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 http://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 http://www.pastebin.com/470945)
– use free http://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:
http://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.