Todd Pinkerton

SMS stands for 'search message service'. It is a way to send short text messages from one mobile phone to another, kinda like email. Unlike email, your mobile phone operator charges you around 10 cents (USD) per message sent, or received. Teenagers and Europeans love it. And the phone company loves it because those 10-cent messages really add up, to the tune of billions of dollars per year. SMS is a great tool for web application developers -- just look at the success of twitter. So how does it work, and how can you incorporate SMS into your application? There are a few mechanisms for sending and receiving SMS. One is to use a phone or modem connected to a computer. The computer can communicate with the phone (or modem), and send or receive messages on behalf of your application. The computer can expose a web service or some other mechanism to allow your application to send or receive messages as needed. Software packages such as NowSMS exist to facilitate this. Another way is to use email. Mobile Carriers in the USA have email-addressable handsets. If you want to send an SMS to 212-555-6789, and you know ...

I attended RailsConf 2007 last weekend in Portland, Oregon. As I sat delayed at the airport, I have a chance to write up some of the highlights from the conference. Thursday was a pre-conference day dedicated to tutorials. These were optional, and at extra cost. I ddin't opt for this because it seemed like a lot of the topics were pretty basic. The one that did look interesting to me was already sold out, so I ended up skipping the entire tutorial day and arrived on Friday. Here is a link to the full schedule. Most of the session presentation slides are here. David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), creator of Ruby on Rails, gave the keynote speech on Friday. He introduced some of the features arriving in Rails 2.0, including built-in REST, debugging and breakpoints, and some performance enhancements like query caching and css/js resource bundling. Nothing revolutionary, just a bunch of nice, useful enhancements. The conference was multi-tracked, meaning you get to pick-and-choose the sessions you attend; it also means you may miss out on something you want to see because it is scheduled at the same time as something else. So Friday I attended Building Community-focused Apps ...

My most recent project, Goloco.org, went live on Earth Day -- April 22. We have been working on it for the past several months, and I'm quite proud of the way it came out. Goloco helps you arrange trips and share rides with friends (or make some friends in the process). You can create an account for free, but you'll need to add some money to your account before you take a trip. Feel free to add me as a friend if you join. You can view my Goloco profile here. Goloco was my first big Ruby on Rails project, and I learned a ton. In the beginning, you had to twist my arm to get me to write tests -- now, I can't write code without them. I've also become a huge fan of RESTful routes, capistrano, CruiseControl, ExceptionNotification, selenium, rcov, and many other plugins and gems. I can't wait to put all this to use again on my next project. A special thanks to Roy, Mike and Michael -- who made the project truly enjoyable.