Yes, Skritter documents my written progress, but I want something to act as a benchmark for my reading. I use this website (~a year ago) to try and learn as many of the common characters as I could. Today I found that same website I used, a year ago, and I was surprised to see how many characters I could read.
http://www.learnchineseez.com/read-write/traditional/index.php
I guess what I'm trying to suggest is this: look at the website above (right now), then look at it again in a year or so... Then you'll feel like your hard work is paying off..... :D

I get your point, but what I don't like about it is that it claims if you know 2500 characters you understand 98% of written Chinese. Ha! I think it's important to focus on number of words, more so than characters, though recognizing characters certainly helps us, it doesn't really accurately represent our true understanding of the written language.

I always found these lists with common characters so boring to go through, but I notice great year-over-year change when it comes to books:
For my first novel, I read 100 pages in 100 hours 1,5 years ago and I'm sure I understood less then now at approximately 6 pages/hour.