How can I get (g)Vim to display the character count of the current file?

Problem

I like to write tutorials and articles for a programming forum I frequent. This forum has a character limit per post. I've used Notepad++ in the past to write posts and it keeps a live character count in the status bar. I'm starting to use gVim more and I really don't want to go back to Notepad++ at this point, but it is very useful to have this character count. If I go over the count, I usually end up pasting the post into Notepad++ so I can see when I've trimmed enough to get by the limit. I've seen suggestions that would help, but this only gives the character count via the current column index on the current line. This would be great if I didn't use paragraph breaks, but I'm sure you'd agree that reading several thousand characters in one paragraph is not comfortable. I read the help and thought that would work, but after looking over the format it uses I didn't see anything that gives a character count for the current buffer. I've seen that there are plugins that add this, but I'…