Continued from Movable Type Microblogging with a mobile phone in Korea; an alternative approach and experiment
Slight modification onto MSN Module 2.1.2 Revision 102 was a starting point. After understanding how the MSN module worked, I could identify where to put my hack code to dispatch a message to a Movable Type blog. As shown below, IPG notification is always followed by a message in form of XML fired from mobile phone. I just put at most around a hundred lines parsing XML, testing data robustness, and finally sending the message to a blog using an XML-RPC script. That's all and complete.
Now, let me talk about drawbacks and improvement opportunities on this implementation.
- Restriction: I was supposed to run this script set on web hosting side. However, hosting server did not allow these scripts to run on server side. All required ports were blocked by firewall. Additionally, most hosting services did not permit back ground process (in case of UNIX variants) running in the manner of infinitive loop. Therefore, I had to operate on my desktop computer. Not a 24 hours a day service now :-)
- Limitation: Phone buddy service supports only text message, not multimedia stream
- Improvement: This implementation maintained code structure suggested for really time processing. Further investigation on MSN protocol specification revealed Offline Messaging. That is, incoming messages will be stacked if I am off lined. When I log on MSN again, messages stacked can be drawn. This mechanism seems to require additional authentication process. However, this can make scripts run by crontab.
In sum, I have to find MSN ready hosting service (not possible in effect) or run my own (not reasonable) with simple solution above at this moment. Next move for realization will include 1. Coupling proxy connection to bypass firewall 2. Pulling out offline messages from MSN
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