Let your readers subscribe to your RSS via SMS
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!
January 9th, 2008 at 1:48 pm
Another route you could have gone…
I used to send text messages to myself via the email gateway at my cell phone provider. So for verizon, I can just send an email message to 9195551212@vtext.com and (assuming that was my real phone number) the email would show up as an SMS message.
I guess that’s not as cool as telling people to text “BestJavaEver” to 41411 to subscribe…
January 9th, 2008 at 1:56 pm
Jason,
Yeah, sending through email gateway would be fine if you have a small number of subscribers and are willing to manage your own subscriber list.
But for a popular blog (not this one, I guess!), you could have many subscribers and the email route will be quickly blocked by wireless carriers as suspect of SMS spammer.
Also, managing who has subscribed and who asked to be taken off is pain to manage yourself.
cheers
Michael
January 9th, 2008 at 4:40 pm
To bad they don’t offer it as apart of FeedBurner.
January 9th, 2008 at 4:51 pm
Hmm, it is a good point to bring up feedburner. Maybe I should look at their developer API to see if it is feasible to add something like this. They already have a “mobile proxy” for displaying feeds on mobile browsers. SMS notification is the natural next step to do …
January 9th, 2008 at 5:08 pm
Hi Michael,
Please consider adding Winksite as a mobilization option.
What we deliver is clean 5/5 .mobi and W3C standards-compliant.
The following URL string delivers a mobile-friendly version of feed content to mobile phones via the Winksite service.
URL String:
http://winksite.com/mobilize.cfm?feed=http://FEED URL]
* Replace [FEED URL] with the feed address
Example: http://winksite.com/mobilize.cfm?feed=http://feeds.feedburner.com/daveharper
January 9th, 2008 at 5:16 pm
Oh, cool! Does winksite do content reformatting for arbitrary web pages? Or, does it just display content in a feed?
January 9th, 2008 at 8:08 pm
…our own mobile site building tools aside we display content available in feeds.
mobilizing blogs aside we’re more inclined to help people glue together services and launch mobile-tuned experiences.
re: arbitrary content adaption we find it somewhat problematic beyond the “blog” use case. in spite of that we need to integrate some content adaption services at our publisher’s discretion.
January 9th, 2008 at 8:09 pm
…and did i ever thank you for including Winksite in your Nokia Smartphone Hacks book?
January 24th, 2008 at 2:27 pm
Michael,
This is great work! We would like to feature this on our TextMarks Developer Center ( http://www.textmarks.com/dev/ ). Please e-mail me so we may discuss.
September 11th, 2008 at 6:20 pm
[...] very easy to use. Below is a screenshot of the admin’s settings. Visit Michael’s blog to get the plugin and installation [...]
September 14th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
Greate plugin! It is interesting to try. Will test tomorrow.
September 27th, 2008 at 9:05 pm
Thank you for this plug-in! You made my life a whole lot easier!
September 30th, 2008 at 7:09 pm
Blew up on my server…
October 8th, 2008 at 10:01 pm
[...] Download the Textmarks Wordpress Plugin [...]
December 31st, 2008 at 4:15 pm
Didn’t work on mine either….does it need to be updated to work with the latest Wordpress version?
Error:
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ‘}’ in /home/mariathe/public_html/wp-content/plugins/textmarks_alerts.php on line 121
January 22nd, 2009 at 1:17 pm
Thanks for the plugin! Looking forward to using it…I’ve just installed it, but was wondering if you had any ideas for allowing visitors to subscribe to specific posts, rather than the entire blog? Is this something you can help me with?
Thanks again!
Best,
Kate