During the Winter Show, instead of printing cards for my project I offered to send people SMS messages with information about it. It was a manual process, though, requiring me to send the message template from my phone. For the Spring Show, however, I’ve created a slightly better service that everyone can use.
The service is simple. It pulls the project information from the ITP Project Database via an RSS feed and returns a text message with the project title, associated student names, and the project’s link. The information is automatically shortened by limiting the title to 30 characters, replacing full names with first initial+last name, and using http://is.gd to make a small URl. Additionally, a user can pass her email address, and an HTML e-mail is sent with a lot more information. It’s built upon the ITPedia service from which I host the ITP directory search I released earlier in the year. A user simply texts the projectID to the Textmarks service (41411) like this:
itpedia spring08 XXXX [email@address.com]
(Remember, the email address is only required if they want to get an email back.)
For example, you can retrieve information about my project by texting “itpedia spring08 1988″ or “itpedia spring08 1988 your_email@address.com” to 41411. To get YOUR project ID, simply login to the Projects Database (https://itp.nyu.edu/projects/) and select the desired project from the left. You’ll see your project page, but more importantly, you’ll find the project ID in the URL after “project_id=”. For example, my project page is “https://itp.nyu.edu/projects/projectinfo.php?project_id=1988″, so my project ID is “1988″.
If anyone in the show wants to use the service, all you have to do is instruct people to send the text. That way they can tag your project for later, and you won’t have to worry about printing up a bunch of cards.