PageScrape

As part of the afore mentioned experiment into using PageScrape to build a simple SMS text message based weather forcast system I registered with Clickatell. They run a Gateway that allows clients to send SMS messages to mobile phones. Clients can submit message for sending via HTTP GET requests --> Enter PageScrape!

It's free to register and they give you 10 credits free. It seems that sending txt messages mostly costs about 0.8 credits each, with each credit costing 0.04 cent. So, sending a txt to Vodafone or o2 costs about 0.032c which isn't too bad....

The minimum number of credits you can purchase is 200 which works out at about a minimum payment of €8.80 to get going, again this is grand, some gateways expect you to spend way more money!

Anyway to send a txt you just need your ApId, username and Password, target mobile number and a message, you can send a txt by issuing the following GET:

http://api.clickatell.com/http/sendmsg?api_id=26437&user=username&password=passwd&to=&text=The Message!

Using PageScrape:

pscrape -u"http://api.clickatell.com/http/sendmsg?api_id=26437&user=username&password=passwd&to=&text=The Message!" -e"(.*)" -g

It seems to work really well, the messages arrive quickly &c.

They have a full HTTP API with methods for querying your credit balance and the like, all of these could be invoked using PageScrape.

Anyway that's the outgoing part of the Weather Forecast System more or less squared away, next, how do we receive SMS messages? Although it costs to send the weather forecast txts, we want to make sure that it costs us _nothing_ to receive the initial request SMSsesses!

Now where's that box of dusty old mobiles....