sms textmessage from your mobile to wordpress

  • Hi wordpressers,

    after a bit of experimenting I found out that the following setup enables you to receive text messages for free into your blog (at least in Finland receiving sms is free and sending almost free).

    – get an old phone or a gsm-modem and plug it into your computer (gsm-modems can be always on; phones may need a timer switch to help the battery)
    – buy a cheap prepaid gsm subscription or monthly or whatever and install it into the aforementioned mobile device
    – install kannel.org open source sms/wap gateway (available on debian and elsewhere, also other sms-gateways such as alamin and smslink might be fancy, and gnokii might be of help to nokia phone users, you can even install ubuntu linux on vmware or similar to do this on win xp if you prefer)
    – write a simple perl script to put your incoming messages from kannel into MySQL database or whatever (on perl use DBI, a lousy example here https://www.pastebin.com/470927)
    – write a simple perl script to publish rss-feed from the database (on perl you might use XML::RSS, for a very lousy and non-secure example see https://www.pastebin.com/470945)
    – use free https://www.dyndns.com/services/dns/dyndns/ or similar (no-ip, etc) to get a static dns address if you have a dynamic ip
    – import your rss-feed to wordpress by using feedList plugin (as list in sidebar or something) or FeedWordPress plugin (as posts)
    – enjoy automatic posting of sms to your site!

    This may give your community a way to send short notices to the website when on field, or whatever applications you might think of. Of course you can also build two-way services with Kannel very easily, but then it is going to cost you (if sending sms is not free for you).

    If you like, you can test my experimental setup here:
    https://katastrofi.is-a-chef.com/rss?k=all
    (newest first) by sending sms to +358408168671 (ordinary mobile phone dedicated to home computer in Finland, gsm prepaid from Sonera). I don’t know how this works with roaming, but possibly ok. Longer than 160 characters sms are splitted (Kannel can send concatenated, but not receive). Throughput might be 10 sms/minute or something. I’ll run this experimental setup for some days or weeks, but then I’m going to put it to some fancy use and this feed will go offline. And pls note that I cannot code, I just hacked this together for my use, so code examples are lousy and even dangerous. ??

    Cheers, Pete.

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  • Warning for North-American users: GSM mobile phone systems that are the usual norm in the rest of the world are very rarely offered by telecom companies on this continent.

    Thread Starter pete2

    (@pete2)

    Thanks moshu, relevant note — yes CDMA networks are of a different breed. And I don’t know if sms text messages are popular in North-America, but here in Finland there are some monthly subscriptions with 1000 sms/month included and still some youngsters top that.

    There is no GSM phone systems in N-A (Some companies just started to introduce it). And the other networks don’t have the correspondent for sms. Some of them have some kinda text messaging thingies, but that’s not the same.
    Before moving to Canada I used GSM phones all over Europe and here I tried all the possible companies – and believe me, on the salesman/customer service level the guys have never heard about GSM and/or SMS.

    O_O?
    You do realize Rogers and Fido are using GSM networks? Only Bell and Telus are CDMA.. I think you’re confusing GSM with 3G aka WCDMA.. 2G GSM has been around for years in the North America..

    Oh, I forgot about the original message. I post from my phone to my site quite often.
    Unless there is something I’m missing posting by SMS is kind of blah.. I don’t know why would you want to post by SMS when you can easly post by sending an email from your phone? Simply use one of the mobloggin plugins out there and you’re all set. Hell, there is an option already buildin for doing that right in the WordPress setup.. ??
    Plus you don’t have to worry about the SMS lenght limit.. ;p

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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