Show HN: Static Site Authoring via SMS

by aparks517 • 5 years ago

38 24 5 years ago

prophesi• 5 years ago

Wow, this is ridiculously cool. Is the site open source?

aparks5177• 5 years ago

Thank you for the kind words! Not at this time. It's only a few hundred lines of Perl. I had planned for it to be a weekend project, but I think I was able to mostly finish it on just a Saturday.

DiggyJohnson3• 5 years ago

I have a different OP on this submission, but would you consider opening sourcing the code so others could build their own sites?

bradley_taunt4• 5 years ago

I would also love to see this open sourced (even partially?). Would be awesome to setup some personal “blogs” based on this.

bradley_taunt4• 5 years ago

In case you were curious, I've just built out a project that walks through how to set up your own (very crude) SMS to Jekyll blog[0]

[0] https://writxt.fun/

jszymborski• 5 years ago

Man, we're back full-circle to OG Twitter, I suppose :D

This is delightful, I really like it.

abhinav22• 5 years ago

Awesome sauce! Now this is thinking creatively!

tyingq3• 5 years ago

I've seen something like this used to get live feedback from an audience during a speech or demo. It's pretty nice for leveling the playing field for introverts. Of course, it's easy for one person to kill it with spam.

aparks5177• 5 years ago

Yeah! We used to use something like that at a place I worked. I think the audience being live put some social pressure against spam. It worked out well for us, especially for big meetings where even the more outgoing folks might have felt uncomfortable putting their hand up and waiting for a microphone.

tyingq3• 5 years ago

If anyone wants to do something like this, I recall the folks that did it used this really simple thing from Anveo that just posts SMS messages to a url: http://www.anveo.com/api.asp?code=apihelp_sms_receive_http&a...

It's not really an API...more of a webhook, but it was really quick and easy to tie to a simple web app, and relatively cheap (~$8/month for a DID number and plan).

viklove• 5 years ago

Twitter?

tyingq3• 5 years ago

SMS was just easier to use to allow for anonymous comments and questions...the web app didn't post what number the comments/questions came from, didn't require any registration, easier to share a phone number to text than a url to enter, etc.

raezo• 5 years ago

Does SMS deduct balance? Or you can SMS for free?

aparks5177• 5 years ago

I don't charge anything from my end. Your carrier may charge something, depending on your agreement with them.

DiggyJohnson3• 5 years ago

I love this project. It's a great response to a "Ask HN: How can I use my phone to create things rather than consume them?" [0]

I look forward to playing around with this.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25570308

aparks5177• 5 years ago

Oh, wow. I had missed that Ask HN. Thanks for making that connection! There are a bunch of cool suggestions in that thread, particularly regarding photography. I can't get over how good photography has gotten on phones.

DiggyJohnson3• 5 years ago

Totally, I am a bit obsessed with that thread (and the lack of obvious answers).

Did you use any special tooling to handle SMS in this application? I didn't realize that this wasn't open-sourced when you first posted it.

I would absolutely help maintain this project if you ever get bored of it and don't want to maintain it yourself.

apricot13• 5 years ago

This reminds me of the old blogging platform Posterous! It was so simple to quickly email a bunch of pictures and some text and then it was published on a nice site - even supported cross posting to wordpress!

john-doe• 5 years ago

Tumblr also had the "post by email" option, and allowed to call a number to record and then post audio snippets.

Show HN: Static Site Authoring via SMS

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