Michael Yuan

As a blog reader, one thing I’d love to do is to subscribe to my favorite blogs via SMS. And by “subscribing”, I do not mean simply getting an SMS alert telling me to “check it out on your PC”. I want the full post to be delivered to my phone — so that I can read it while I am driving (kidding!).

Well, thanks to the good folks at textmarks and mowser, I just did exactly that for my own wordpress blog (See how it works). As promised, I am releasing my little wordpress plugin here. Here is what you need to do to mobilize your blog:

1. Sign up for a free keyword at textmarks. This is the keyword people will text in to subscribe to your blog.

2. Request for a free API key from textmarks. This key is needed to broadcast SMS messages.

3. Get my plugin here, unzip it and drop the textmarks_alerts.php file in your wp-content/plugins directory, and then activate the plugin from your wordpress admin console.

4. Go to the Options –> Textmarks Options tab, and fill in your account and keyword information from textmarks. You will also need to fill in the root URL of your wordpress blog. You can choose to use Google or Moswer to adapt your blog pages for mobile screen viewing. Choose “none” if you already have Andy Moore’s wordpress mobile plugin installed. See more explanation on the plugin options page.

That’s it folks! Your readers can simply subscribe your blog by texting in your keyword to short number 41411. The subscribers will get a mobile web link for every new post from now on!

Okay, if all those sound too complicated but you still want to use the plugin. Send me $100 and I will take care of everything for ya.

cheers
Michael

PS. The scripts uses Binny V A’s free PHP load() function (from bin-co.com) to make make network connections. It is gets around the sometimes blocked file_get_content() call. Thanks Binny!