Parannoyed Delusions

...to write a program, that is. And so I've written another nifty little blogging tool, this time in python. Python is one of those programming languages that sounds scary and hard to learn but actually isn't at all. So this program I wrote is called sms2blogger. What it does is that it checks an e-mail account for messages that corresponds to a certain format, parses the message, and posts the parsed message into my Blogger acount via the Blogger API. Now, the SMS part is a bit trickier. I needed an SMS gateway that allows me to send an SMS to it, which will then relay the SMS as e-mail to a specified address. And it also needs to be free (besides the normal SMS charges). I'm using DiGi which has no built-in service for this (unlike Maxis, if I'm not mistaken). After scouring the net I found a web site that allows me to do just this, Excell.to. And it's free. All I needed to do was to register via my phone. And to send e-mail, all I need to do is write:

EMAIL email@address.com .subject.message body

And send to their SMS gateway number. But unfortunately I had to wait almost 2 hours for any e-mail to reach.

By the way, if you're familiar with Blogger's advanced features, you might be wondering why am I using the Blogger API to post the blog, instead of Blogger's Mail-to-Blogger feature. The reason is, if you check out some of Blogger's known issues, Mail-to-Blogger has some unresolved problems. Besides, it was down a couple of times, very unstable.

The last piece of puzzle is to find a way to automatically check the e-mail account for 'SMS posts' once one is recieved. To do this, I use cron on a FreeBSD shell account I have, to execute my sms2blog python script, say every 6 or 12 hours. Perfect.

All I need to do now is to test it out. So watch out for really short posts with short text abbreviations every 6 to 12 hours for the next 2 days.

P.S. For source codes, please visit http://bsd.miki.eu.org/~abu/sms2blogger/. However, these sources are not documented and/or supported, so if you want to use them on your own server, etc., use at your own risk.

Update: Again, the link to the source codes is not working anymore.