Tada! You can now beemind posting to the Beeminder forum, or any forum that uses the same forum software. Which is a lot of other fora. All the cool kids use it. It’s called Discourse. Not to be confused with Discord (more on this below), the instant messaging platform. Which, we suppose, is what the very coolest kids use exclusively. But they are objectively wrong. Having a community that uses chat exclusively is terrible. When people in a community help each other, you want that preserved for posterity, not scrolling away into the abyss.
Ok, but, confession: this integration adds zero additional functionality beyond what RSSminder already provides. The difference is that, try as we did to make “feed Beeminder graphs directly from RSS feeds” normal-person-friendly, approximately zero normal people were persuaded. And even for übernerds, friction matters.
So now it is dirt simple to beemind posting more often. The most technically challenging part is knowing your username: [1]
Why would I want to do this?
We have eight reasons! Seven of them are covered in our previous blog post, “The Power of Rearticulating Insights in Your Own Words,” about why, in general, it’s surprisingly valuable to write forum posts (or blog posts). The eighth reason is that beeminding your forum posts is the price of admission to the Beeminder community Discord.
Just link us to your Beeminder forum-posting goal in a new forum thread I just created — Postminder Thread — and you’re in. Probably. We also have to personally like your forum posts. The Beeminder Discord is highly exclusive, ok?
Why do you hate your users this much?
It’s not like that! But we do have two reasons for being so restrictive about who we let into the Discord. First, it’s very cozy and high-quality and non-overwhelming, and we hope to keep it that way. Second, as we alluded to above, it’s a safeguard to keep the Beeminder community Discord from cannibalizing the amazing Beeminder Forum.
Or ignore the bit about the Discord (again, not to be confused with Discourse, the forum software Beeminder and many others use) and focus on the forum. If you’re looking for other ideas for forum posts, here are some recommendations:
- The Introduction Thread
- The Gratitude Journaling Thread (thousands of entries over 5 years)
- Start a journal in the Life category
If you’re sold, head to beeminder.com/new, pick the Discourse/Postminder icon from the list of integrations, and answer the questions about how much you want to commit to posting. Or, here, have a button:
Footnotes
[1] If knowing your username is too much of a technical hurdle, then, realistically, this isn’t going to work out.