Umbrella Today launches
Posted by Kevin Burg
Sep 05
Today we officially launched Umbrella Today - the "simplest weather report ever". Enter your zip code and then your cell phone number to get a text message on days that you should bring an umbrella with you — it's as simple as that.
The actual deploy to production occurred live during our talk at the Lone Star Ruby Conference as part of a training session. More information on training sessions can be found here.
Stay dry!
Comments on this post
Sep 05
dxoigmn said,
I noticed you ask the user for their cell carrier and had wondered why. Once I received the SMS message, I realized you’re just using the carrier-provided email-to-SMS gateways. Any plans to auto-detect the carrier? Is it even technically possible?
Would be a nice little side project to create a gem that makes this easy (which mostly amounts to keeping a nice update-to-date list of email gateways for each carrier).
Sep 05
dxoigmn said,
I noticed you ask the user for their cell carrier and had wondered why. Once I received the SMS message, I realized you’re just using the carrier-provided email-to-SMS gateways. Any plans to auto-detect the carrier? Is it even technically possible?
Would be a nice little side project to create a gem that makes this easy (which mostly amounts to keeping a nice update-to-date list of email gateways for each carrier).
Sep 05
dxoigmn said,
Argh! Sorry for the double post. Not even sure how that happened.
Sep 05
Matt Jankowski said,
dxoigmn – we initially wanted to setup a full sms gateway, phone server, “short code”, etc – but when we looked into costs for that, considering we were creating a free service to supplement a training course, we decided that the email gateway was the way to go.
As far as we could tell, there’s not a way to determine carrier from just the number. We used the sms_fu plugin which maintains a list of carriers and their email addresses.
Sep 05
JMershon said,
I’d love to see this in a gadget for iGoogle or desktop. Any chance that will be available sometime?
Sep 08
Rob said,
This app is awesome! I think this would be invaluable for golfers, wanting to know the likely hood of rain before going to play.
R
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