UK SMS to Jaiku gateway

Published by David Carrington on November 24, 2007 under Mobile

Some facts to get started:

  • Sending an SMS to Jaiku from my phone costs me 25p.
  • Sending an SMS to any UK number from my phone is free.

I had a quick go at asking if people were interested, and it seems I’m not the only one that would benefit from a service which can forward UK messages to Jaiku in Finland – especially if it was free.

Who is this for?

This service is designed for UK residents that want to send messages to Jaiku by SMS on their phone without paying the international fee. I don’t guarantee uptime or service or anything like that, so please don’t rely on it working forever. I’ll let people know of any changes.

Instructions:

  1. Sign in to Jaiku.
  2. Visit the API page to find your personal API key.
  3. Register: Send an SMS to +447786202820 with the message “tojaiku register myusername myapikey”. e.g. “tojaiku register davidcarrington 123abc456def”.
  4. Test: Send an SMS to the same number with your message, prefixed “tojaiku”. For example: “tojaiku This is my first test message via Dave’s UK gateway”.
  5. And that’s it!

Costs:

You will pay your usual SMS cost of sending a text message to a UK number for each message sent. I personally get 3000 free texts on Orange, so I don’t worry about it.

General Notes:

  • This service will never send you any messages, including during registration.
  • The “tojaiku” and “register” commands are not case sensitive.
  • I don’t store your messages or any usage stats.
  • I do store your username and API key in a MySQL database (there’s no other way to make it work).
  • I created a Jaiku channel if anyone wants to join that to receive updates

If you have any questions or comments, please add a comment or contact me via Jaiku if you prefer.

Intercepting SMS messages for Jaiku

Published by David Carrington on November 23, 2007 under Misc

New SMS notification: “nicholasclarke: A crazy week of work coming up! Never a good thing.”

Combine that with ability to intercept text messages into my own application on my phone, this basically means I can write a Jaiku application which keeps track of everyone’s Jaikus but doesn’t interfere in my day by beeping and flashing at me 24/7.

In theory, this means I could write a Windows Mobile Jaiku client that stays off GPRS.

WordPress SMS comment notications

Published by David Carrington on October 16, 2007 under Mobile, Web

I’ve been looking lately at how I can link WordPress in more closely with my phone with SMS or similar technology. One of the key things I’ve implemented is SMS notification of comments on my blog.

Every comment triggers an e-mail that gets delivered to my catch-all Gmail account. I’ve then set up a Gmail filter which finds all e-mails from my blog and forwards them to my Orange e-mail account (by phone contract provider).

Orange will then forward each e-mail as an SMS notification to my mobile. The only drawback at this stage being that it will only send a snippet of the subject – but I can at least see which post has received a comment.

WordPress on the go with SMS and MMS

Published by David Carrington on October 11, 2007 under Mobile, Web

I have a phone

Yes, amazing isn’t it. But even better – the internet has phones too. More and more sites are making their services available in the small format with ever increasing interactivity. Only last month I realised that the text message event reminders pushed out by Google Calendar are free! So with the power of my wonderful Pocket PC phone and spare time in my lunch hour, I bring you the Mobile Web: how it affects this site and me.

Read more »