Creating a Digital Garden in 11ty: Tracking My Daily Word Count with URLminder

Continuing where I left off yesterday [writing about Beeminder](https://brennan.day/beeminder-getting-back-on-the-horse/), I realized that there were a couple goals/systems that I needed to modify due to how various integration options and API have changed.

I used to have a goal named [**/github**](https://beeminder.com/brennanbrown/github) which would track my commits across all my repositories on GitHub. But GitHub's API changed, and so now you can only track the commits of one repository at a time. Beyond this, most of my active and maintained projects are now on other platforms like [GitLab](https://gitlab.com/brennankbrown) and [Source.tube](https://source.tube/brennan/) due to [my grievances with GitHub](https://github.com/brennanbrown/brennanbrown#%EF%B8%8F-choose-a-better-developer-platform).

<small>(An aside: I deleted most of my corporate social media, but I maintain a GitHub for my professional career, which is currently non-existent, lol.)</small>

Anyways, I decided to use this as a good excuse to build an experiment that's been on my mind for awhile: a dedicated, low-friction place to dump my day-to-day small stuff which doesn't really belong on [Brennan.day](https://brennan.day). Quotes, bookmarks, half-formed notes, a diary line, a code snippet worth remembering. I want to create a commonplace book, wiki-linked digital garden which I have a reason to work on every day.

I have been collecting (hoarding) domains like a magpie, and I decided to use https://brennan.click for this project.

## The /urlminder.txt Feed (tracking word count)

I realized I could kill two birds with one stone with this project. I used to use the wonderful online Markdown editor [Draft](https://web.archive.org/web/20230104023309/https://draftin.com/) to track the amount of words I wrote per day on Beeminder on my goal [**/writing**](https://beeminder.com/brennanbrown/writing). They sadly shut down and I never found a good alternative.

I actually tried creating my own, a Swift MacBook app called [Bearminder](https://github.com/brennanbrown/bearminder), which uses the [Bear](https://bear.app/) API to send word count to Beeminder. But I found it too cumbersome and I am not a good Swift dev.

But, I realized this project was the perfect opportunity for me to actually finally use [URLminder](https://help.beeminder.com/article/88-urlminder), which lets Beeminder count the words in any publicly accessible URL. It's typically meant for Google Docs, and raw HTML will inflates your word count with every markup tag, but it is accurate with plain-text.

I decided to create an Eleventy function in .11ty.js template format to define a route that isn't backed by a markdown file at all, just a render function returning plain text:

```javascript export const data = { perm