My TODO list in SMS

Update: Twe2 is shutting down :-( so this will no longer work.

Great news,
There's a new website called Twe2 that lets you get Twitter notifications by SMS outside the US (their business model is to add a short ad message to the end of each SMS).

I've been using remember the milk for quite some time now but a lot of tasks were overdue, either because I'm too lazy or because the notifications by mail or even by the gadget I added to my Gmail account were not prominent enough.

So to try and eliminate at least one of the reasons for my tasks not getting done, I set up remember the milk to send my task notifications to twitter and then with the help of Twe2 I get reminded by SMS.

Still have to work on eliminating the other problem though :-)

Twitter as a notifications hub

In HiveSight we're trying to keep eyes on our production environment as well as the status of services we need for development such as our continuous integration server and various other long running automation scripts we run on Amazon AWS.

We were looking for a way to easily see all the notifications as a single stream of data - so here is what we did:

First, we created a Twitter account where all the messages will go.
Then we made sure all notifications will be sent to the HiveSight Twitter account.
Now we can become followers of that account to receive updates.

Here are a few examples of what we used it for:

For continuous integration we're using Hudson - build results are sent to the twitter account using a plugin that was written by the Hudson community.

For production servers monitoring we're using nagios. Nagois is very easy to extend so we're using the twitter JSON API to update our account using the Linux curl command:

curl --basic --user "username:password" --data-ascii "status=Nagios: $NOTIFICATIONTYPE$ $HOSTALIAS$/$SERVICEDESC$ is $SERVICESTATE$" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json

We use the same method to send notifications from various EC2 automation scripts.

We also wrote a twitter-log4j extension that allows us to log errors from our applications directly to twitter. We open-sourced it so you can find it here

Now that we have all the messages in Twitter, we developed a very simple Ruby script that is executed every few minutes, checks if there are new messages that require immediate attention and sends and SMS if there are.