Tim Dupree

The other day I decided to play around with the Msgme SMS platform.  My goal was to create a application that lets my wife record the number of hours she works.  She just needs something very simple. So my idea was to make a little app that lets her use her cell phone or web browser to indicate start and stop times of when she is working.  I was going to tie in the Msgme SMS service to allow her to text “timeStart” or “timeStop”.  Msgme allows you to set up keywords that are tied to their SMS number.  Then when someone sends that keyword to the number you can return a simple message from Msgme or interact with an external web app (that you create), among other things.

So when she sends “timeStart” to Msgme, Msgme then sends that message along to a php page I create which then records the action “start” and the time and date of the request to a database.  Sending “timeStop” will record the action “stop” along with the time and date.  Then another pag ecan parse that info, figuring out time elapsed between start/stop actions and display that data textually and visually using the google charts API.

I was on my way to setting up the system when I encountered the dreaded “Exception Error” response from Msgme when clicking on the “Test” button for testing the response from the external application.  It for some unknown reason is failling on the call from Msgme to the external app.  I can change the msgme request to have it ask for an rss feed, and then format my output for the rss specs and it works fine, but the msgme service polls the rss feed twice, which results in two db entries, so it’s not a viable work around.  If anyone has ever encountered this and was able to come up with a fix, let me know.

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Update (12/19/08): After several emails and a couple days the problem got fixed.  I was very unimpressed with the support I received initially (I think whoever was answering the support emails wasn’t very technical and was just writing back canned responses).  But I just received an email from a developer for Msgme who informed me that it was an error on their side, he fixed it, and that everything should work fine now.  Yay! He was really genuine and apologized for the problems. I really appreciated it.