ITPlay » sms

Story Writing, 160 Characters at a Time

Steve — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 16:19:11 +0000

Twitter is still reinventing the way we communicate. At 140 characters per tweet, it is so easy, and somewhat mindless to broadcast a message to the world (or at least your followers). The common way we view these short messages is in list form which maintains our perception of each tweet being independent of the next.

Now butt each tweet one after the other in paragraph form. The perceived effect is that we are now writing one, extremely long story (narrative, documentary, autobiography, etc.) This is what my project aims to explore.

Whether or not you are aware of it, your Twitter account, @alias, has a persona of its own. And if you were calculating about it, you may have purposefully created the personality perceived through your tweets. In a serendipitous event, while I was trying to form this idea of “short messages combined to form narrative,” a friend (unknowing of my new project) sent this to me in an email. Briefly, Andrea Pitzer writes about Peggy Nelson’s intentional use of Twitter to bring characters (fictional/historical) to life. Can Twitter and SMS be leveraged to create a narrative 140/160 characters at at time?

Equipment Room SMS Rental System

Steve — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 18:12:28 +0000

In the first step of many, I have a basic SMS rental system functioning.

To test the system text the following to 41-411:
itper checkout A1534

This follows the syntax required by the TextMarks.com service of using the 41411 shortcode for their system, followed by my registered keyword “itper” followed by an internal keyword (either “checkout” or “return” and finally the serial number identifying the equipment you are checking out.

How does this work?
The TextMarks.com service allows a text sent by anyone with the above syntax to ping a custom PHP page I’ve coded. The custom page records the sender’s phone number, text message, and timestamps the record as well. Then the script can recognize whether or not you’ve entered “checkout” or “return” and it sends a confirmation back to the sender.

How to make it better?
I’m going to continue developing this system to improve my PHP and mySQL skills. As a result of texting the “checkout” or “return” commands I would like a record in a separate database table to keep track of who has each piece of equipment checked out, as well as when it is due back. The due back date should then be sent with the confirmation after a ITP student checks out a piece of equipment.

ITP-centric SMS-based Application

Steve — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 20:21:04 +0000

Charged with creating an SMS-based system to benefit the ITP community, I would have to suggest an SMS-enabled check-in/check-out system for equipment room rentals. Too many times a single person working the ER is overwhelmed by an onslaught of fellow ITP’ers. This system would reduce the ER-worker’s job to retrieving the items from the shelves. Then, the student checking out the item would send an SMS text to a defined short code with the item’s identification number in the body of the text. The text would hit the ER system and know what student checked out what item. Additionally, the system could then SMS back with a confirmation and the “due back” date.

Black Hole

Steve — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 13:30:42 +0000

An animation made using Adobe After Effects, Adobe Photoshop.