Beeminder API

We’re delighted to announce that the Beeminder API is now open to the public! Before you dive into the full documentation, let’s start with a taste of this beeliciousness. First, grab your personal auth token from beeminder.com/api/v1/auth_token.json. Let’s pretend it’s TOOLEGIT. You can now add a data point to your graph from the command line like so:

curl --data 'auth_token=TOOLEGIT&timestamp=1346774400&value=1&comment=api+test' https://www.beeminder.com/api/v1/users/meta/goals/uvi/datapoints.json

Programmatic adding of data points is the biggie but the API supports most of everything else you can do from the website. [1] In fact, our soon-to-be-announced Android and iPhone apps use our API. (UPDATE: Android/iPhone announcement.) For that kind of fanciness, we support oauth as well as the dirt simple personal auth tokens like in the above example.

Our amazing beta users [2] of the Beeminder API have already done some wonderful things with it:

• Stefan Dorn wrote an Anki add-on to automatically send his Anki numbers to Beeminder.
• Paul J. Fenwick wrote a Remember the Milk + Beeminder mashup he calls Remember-the-Beeminder wherein he assigns points to tasks and then beeminds the collecting of said points.
• Jonathan “Duke” Leto integrated Beeminder with GitHub to count commits. [UPDATE: We have built-in GitHub integration now with Gitminder.]
• Dreeves brought TagTime up to code (fire marshall approved).
• Danny O’Brien wrote a script to count number of websites visited from his browser history. (It’s a proxy for how distracted he is.)
• Jake Hofman is writing a small daemon that parses Garmin’s RSS feed and submits it via the Beeminder API.
• Alice Harris put together a custom web form for submitting data to all her goals at once.
• Michael Gruen used the Beeminder API to send data from Goodreads to update his Beeminder goal of reading more.

Some of the above use the kludgetastic alpha version of the API and haven’t been converted yet. We’ll try to get everyone to publish their hacks and mashups — perhaps to github.com/beeminder — when they upgrade to the new API.

UPDATE: More tools people are building with the Beeminder API (as Ezra Bradford points out, we should dub this the Apiary!)…

• Php library
• Python library
• WordPress plugin to beemind your blogging
• Beeminder + Memrise integration
• Hourglass watcher in Python
• RescueTime + Beeminder integration [We now have an official RescueTime integration.]
• Beeminding your Fogbugz tickets
• Official Beeminder Android app!
• Official Beeminder iPhone app! [Now open source.]
• Beeminder writing check — minds kilobytes written in a Dropbox folder
• A “Do Every So Often” Minder
• Automatically update Beeminder based on Foursquare checkins
• Beeminder Perl module on CPAN
• .Net Beeminder library
• Beeminder Ruby Gem [Now at github.com/beeminder.]
• Beeminder + Hazel + TextExpander for automatic beeminding of wordcount and pomodoros, by Julian Friedman
• Beeminder Clock to send your time spent clocked in to a Beeminder goal
• Really nicely done command line interface to beeminder
• CodeAcademy integration
• Beemind pomodoros
• List Beeminder goals by urgency from the command line
• Applescript pomodoro minder
• Mind meditation data from insighttimer.com
• Beeminder’s Mashape page (see also Mashape’s blog post
• Fitminder
• Asana-Beeminder integration
• Displaying your Beeminder goal status with Ruby
• Streak CRM integration
• Another Python wrapper for the Beeminder API
• So many other things we’ve been failing to add to this list! See for example the Tech category of the Beeminder forum
• BeeminderJS, a JavaScript (NodeJS) library for use in apps and as a standalone shell interface (created by Malcolm Ocean of Complice)

Finally, here’s a list of devices and apps we plan to integrate with [3] but, as you can see, there are more than we can get to in a reasonable time. (See also our previous list of tracking apps.) So don’t wait for us — start mashing things up!

UPDATE: We moved the list of upcoming integrations to the Beeminder forum.

Footnotes

[1] Please let us know if there’s something you want to automate that the API doesn’t yet support!

[2] Special thanks to John Millikin for finding a small security hole!

[3] Devices and apps we currently integrate with: TagTime, Withings, GreenGoose, Tallybee, RunKeeper, Gmail. UPDATE: Trello, Fitbit, RescueTime, Github. ANOTHER UPDATE: See the bottom of beeminder.com/services for the full list.

Image credit: Buzzbee the Robot Bee by Pete, aka buildersstudio on Etsy.

Tags: api, bee-all, FAQ, gadgets, integrations, meta, quantified self

Posted 2012 Sep 5. RSS feed for comments on this post. Please leave a response, or trackback from your own site.