If you are reading this blog, chances are pretty good you are not a hermit living in a cave somewhere. That means odds are you have heard of Twitter. Twitter is the super-hyped web service that allows you to post short messages that anyone else can read to see what you are up to. I'm still trying to understand the hype, seeing how I thought we have been doing this with away messages for at least 10 years. However, I do like the fact that you can update this information by phone. I have always been thrilled with being able to affect things from a distance. The idea of being able to update a webpage from anywhere I have a cell signal blows my mind. I can 100 miles from my computer and still post a message to my class website.
I experimented with Twitter here and there over the past few months. Like many such services, Twitter offers code to post widgets on any website that will show your status. My problem was that they only had 2 or 3 different options for the widget, none of which were particularly attractive to me. I felt there had to be a way to make my own widget and display a message sent via text message on a cell phone. After several failed attempts, I finally found a way to do this without Twitter. Twitter could drop off the face of the net tomorrow, and my page would still work.
You can test it out below. Here's how:
**Click here to open the test page in a new window**
- Send a text message to 41411. It is a site called Textmarks.com.
- The first word of the text must be edutech
- After that you can type your own message (edutech Here is my message.)
- Refresh this page.
- Read your message below.
