Hi Skritterati and Skritterverse,

I was wondering if anyone could please give me some hints about linking in with the Skritter API for my Beeminder account.

When I was doing some Googling about this yesterday, I found out that someone (username on GitHub is wfreemen) has integrated Skritter and Beeminder, so his stats are reported to Beeminder (https://github.com/wfreeman/skritter-beeminder/commit/5201ad7d06c8b0385077b18fe719bfc2f82bd470#diff-0)

I was really hoping that I could do this, but unfortunately as I do not have a tech background (though I am not tech-illiterate) I cannot do it myself.

Any help would be greatly appreciated! :-)

Cheers,
Joe

P.S. I have also contacted wfreeman on Gihub.

I think Nick had done this but gave up on it due to unresolved issues.

Nick had this working for him (I think he mentions it in his book as well) and used it successfully for his thousands-of-character challenges among other.
However when I asked him about that before, he said that his hack was in no shape to be sharable, but that skritter has since published an API and that one should now be able to more easily write something much more stable.
I haven't spent the time to figure it out yet though.

A bit of an update on this. I have been in touch with Wes who is the writer of the code.

He has got in touch Nick who has also got in touch with Bethany at Beeminder. The short of it is that they have promised to have official integration ***fingers crossed***...by the end of this month!!

Normally, I would take these announcements with a grain of salt...but it is the folk at Beeminder who have made the promise, and knowing them they have probably beeminded the goal! :-)

Great, thanks for the update. I'm procrastinating my new year resolutions. I used to input my time studied in Beeminder manually. Nick had mentioned to me that its better to make goals out of inputs rather than outputs. That makes sense, as I have control and can be accountable for how much time I spend studying (within reasonable limits) whereas a goal of how much I "learn" is fraught with problems. Said that, I want to use Skritter in a way that seems smarter for me this year. I plan to ban more words, and try to come up with a compromise between using Skritter as a short term cram tool and trying to retain every word I have ever once written in Skritter. Despite the negative connotations of "cramming," at least it implies that you are highly motivated, if only temporarily, to learn the words. If the words come from "the real world" (as opposed to a textbook) its also probably relatively more likely that I will be needing to know the word again in the not too distant future -- sort of a real life SRS. Any advice on banning / cramming / beeminding singly or in combination welcome! Happy New Year, everybody.

Hey podster, that sounds like a great plan for the new year! I assume you are familiar wirh Nick's book? I think it would make the best companion for your resolutions.
I don't mind the cramming, because it's easier to be motivated when you see progress. Therefore I would start out cramming and then adjust my input later to be sustainable.

For banning words, I found the help of native speakers very helpful. Whenever I feel like just can't remember a word, I give it a star and show the starred list to a native friend to help me decide.
Happy New Year!

Thanks, Herakles. I'm aware of Nick's book but haven't read it yet. Maybe I will make a gift of it to myself. I have lots of access to native speakers, but I never thought to share my Skrittering with them. Brilliant suggestion, thanks.

Agreed, Nick's book is excellent (http://www.amazon.com/The-Motivation-Hacker-Nick-Winter-ebook/dp/B00C8N4FNK for those who aren't aware).

Beeminder integration is great news!

James

Hi Skritterers! We got *slightly* telephone-gamed on the "promised by end of January" thing BUT you are totally right that, come on, we're Beeminder! So we have the next best thing:

I hereby promise that we'll launch official Skritter integration before anything else except ones we've already started on (Epson/Seiko, Garmin, IFTTT, and Misfit -- all of which we hope we can do in January, but now that it's January 10 we're noticing that's not realistic).

AND I hereby promise that Bethany (our CTO) will spend 20 hours/week on the pending integrations (including Skritter) until they're all launched. Here's her Beeminder graph to prove it: http://beeminder.com/b/autod

But wait there's more! Every derailment she coughs up on we'll pay out to you. Yes, you. :) We'll figure out the details the first time it happens but the pledge schedule is $5, $10, $30, $90, $270, $810.

What do you think?

Awesome. I'm just starting a new Skritter goal. I'm ready to receive Bethany's money, (dibs) but I'll be happier if the goal is met soon with no lapses.

We just lost our first $5 but the yellow brick road continues mercilessly! I'm actually going to pay it out twice, once to podster (let me know how to get it to you!) and once to Alok Singh who was the first to respond to my beemail about this. From now on let's say it's the first person to comment after we derail. $10 is now at stake!

@ Daniel, Well that's a bummer, but I am still using beeminder the old fashioned way and been able to stay more focused on Skrittering as a result.

We're up to $90 now and this thread on the Beeminder forum -- http://forum.beeminder.com/t/hard-committing-to-the-next-batch-of-autodata-integrations/420 -- is the place to claim our money! Derailments should be rare now that $90 is at stake. :)

We've launched 1 of the 4 integrations (Epson/Seiko) that are coming before Skritter and 2 more (IFTTT and Garmin) are working in beta, and the last one, Misfit, is coming along.

We've also made progress on Skritter itself.

So this is definitely happening! Thanks for all the enthusiasm!