Daily Word Counts for Blogs & Google Docs

I’m writing this post to test out a new service that I set up. If This Then That (IFTTT.com) uses APIs to connect various services. In this case, I gave it some basic information about my Blog and some information about my Google Drive account. Using those connections, IFTTT will now backup my blog post as a Google Doc.

If everything works as I think it will with my IFTTT applet, I will start having doc files with the text of each of my blog posts. I am also running Google Docs Writing Tracker as developed by Jamie Todd Rubin and others on GitHub. Jamie built a set of scripts to count the words written in any file a given Google Doc folder. The count is generated each night and saved into a Google Spreadsheet. A second script will generate a daily “Almanac” of the user’s writing. This almanac is generated as an email to the user reporting on the number of words written along with 7-day averages and consecutive day writing streaks.

I am writing a couple of research projects in my Google Docs folder and will use the IFTTT applet to also pull in the backups of my blog posts. The Google Docs Writing Tracker will then count my total words written each day and send me a report.

If all of this works out as I hope it will, I will then add a few functions to Jamie’s open code to allow people to publish their almanacs to a website and then build in further functionality for comparing almanacs across a group.

If I can get all of this to work, I’ll fork Jamie’s code set on GitHub, update it with my changes, and post a link in another blog post.