Post to a weblog via SMS.

May 24, 2002 12:26 PM

Post to a weblog via SMS. Just this weblog, unfortunately, not your own. I tried it with my Voicestream phone and it works. I'm surprised there aren't more wireless blogs out there that use SMS. (Or have I just been missing them?)
posted by brownpau (15 comments total)

At the risk of being accused of a self-link, I also have a wireless weblog on blogspot which I update using my Nokia 3390 and the AIM Bloggerbot. Also, Pinoyexchange.com in the Philippines has an SMS-enabled vBulletin section, which is perfect for us text-crazy Filipinos.
posted by brownpau at 12:30 PM on May 24, 2002

Well here's a halfway-working mod of the PHPBB forum that works in Japanese phones for reading recent posts and posting replies.
posted by curiousg at 12:33 PM on May 24, 2002

(Of course, I say things about self-linking, then I forget to link myself. My mobile blog is at brownpau.blogspot.com.)
posted by brownpau at 12:35 PM on May 24, 2002

Here is the perl code if you want to try this at home, courtesy of Raelity Bytes guy whose real name I forgot, via BoingBoing.net

code
posted by mecran01 at 12:56 PM on May 24, 2002

Excellent bit of code! I would love some way to text entries to my MT blog, so I'd use this if I could figure it out ... but there's something I'm not getting along the way: how does he SMS to his computer? And how about those of us non-techies who aren't hosted on our own home servers?
posted by brownpau at 1:23 PM on May 24, 2002

This isn't actually blogging via SMS. It's blogging via email. Which answers your question, brownpau, about how it gets to his computer: he emails from his phone to an address set up for the purpose.
posted by lbergstr at 1:54 PM on May 24, 2002

The guy with the code is Raffi Krikorian.
posted by precipice at 2:02 PM on May 24, 2002

Yeah, when I wrote BloggerBot, I was actually trying to think of a good way to interface SMS->blogger, but there were aim-capable phones coming out, and just using BloggerBot seemed like the easiest solution. I'm pretty sure there are a bunch of people using it this way.
posted by chacal at 3:51 PM on May 24, 2002

Ben and I did this when we went on a roadtrip, but we did it via email, not SMS. However, although AT&T has service almost everywhere, it doesn't have full service (including email) in all places. I'm not exactly sure how Ben coded it, but it involved Pine filters and whathaveyou, but he did say that he figured out an easier way, but I don't know what it is.
posted by animoller at 6:26 PM on May 24, 2002

Somewhere around here I must have the Procmail filter I used to update a page regularly from my BellSouth IPS pager. It was basically a mail interface to a particular alias, which the filter then proceeded to emit to HTML.

It's not a big deal, it could be done in any 10 or 20 lines of your favorite script language and a little procmail glue. Took me maybe 10 minutes to set up at the time, since I was busy with all the knuckle-chewing work of standing around watching a baby delivery.
posted by majick at 11:26 PM on May 24, 2002

does anyone know of a site with instructions on setting up a wireless blog like this one mentioned above? i'm trying to figure out how it was set up, but it is a little out of my league...
posted by saralovering at 10:35 AM on May 25, 2002

How about an AIM/email/SMS interface for Movable Type?
posted by muckster at 11:04 AM on May 25, 2002

"... instructions on setting up a wireless blog..."

Well, the script is right there; I don't know anything about Blogger so I can't say how well the gateway is expected to work. Down at the end of it are the instructions:

"i installed it in /etc/aliases, and now i can send e-mail from my phone to that address"

That means add a pipe entry into your mail server's /etc/aliases file. It's just a matter of adding one line to the file and then sending your messages to that alias. If you don't have access to your mail server's alias file, you'll have a hard time making any kind of email-to-something gateway. Talk to the mail admin or find a friend with a mail server to hook it up for you.

"interface for Movable Type?

This is a little less trivial, but at least you get source code with Movable Type, so it's possible.
posted by majick at 6:14 AM on May 26, 2002

Gaby Vanhegan, the dude behind the SMS weblog, asked me to post this on his behalf, while signups are still closed...

I wrote the entire thing from scratch using PHP, an old Nokia phone and a Pay-as-you-go SIM card for the phone. The phone plugs into the server, gnokii pulls the messages off and puts them into a DB. The web server on my machine in the office processes and displays them. There's no Perl involved and you are actually sending an SMS direct to a computer.

Yes, I do have a server, it's in the machine room of the ISP I work for (perk of the job, free co-loc). If anyone's interested in the code I'll happily give them some info...

posted by brownpau at 9:45 PM on May 27, 2002

Yeah, just to clarify, my comment above referred to Raffi Kirkorian's stuff, not Gaby's.
posted by lbergstr at 8:30 AM on May 28, 2002