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Furret Blog - Now weekly! (or I lose my pie money)

• 03 Nov, 2025 *

I’ve been very intrigued by the concept of Beeminder, a goal tracking service that keeps you committed to your goals by charging you actual money if you don’t stick to them. Which sounds like something no rational person would agree to (why stake your hard-earned cash on something you might not do when you can just keep it in your bank account?), but as they explain in one of their extremely detailed blog posts on the matter, you can exploit our predictable inconsistency on how we think about our preferences over time. Or in other words, I can move my intention to write a blog post Soon™ to a specific point (e.g. 12am this Saturday night), and have more riding on it than just the vague guilt of abandoning your goal to become a Cool Blogging Guy.

So as of right now I have a goal to write at least 1/7th of a blog post1 every day (with a couple buffer days at the start), or else I lose USD$5 (or NZD$8.73 at time of writing a.k.a the price of a moderately fancy bakery pie here in New Zealand). They’re nice enough to let you cancel your goal (with a week’s notice) and take breaks, so I’m not locked into posting #content here until the end of time. But hopefully this gets me into the upper echelon of bloggers who don’t just abandon their blogs forever after 2 posts. Or maybe these weird commitment hacks won’t work on me. Who knows, now that I’ve used up the blindingly obvious blog post topic and I actually have to think of something else to write about.

But first I need to check if their RSS integration works and it will actually log this post I’m writing now.2

Well, operationally one post a week. They naturally have a blog post explaining why exactly they make you specify your goals that way.↩ 1.

Among many other things they also support getting data via curl and regex, to let you know the demographic they’re targeting (dorks like me)↩