Easily capture ideas or TODOs into org-mode through an app almost everyone has installed: SMS!
- You'll need your org-mode agenda files synced via Dropbox
- A Twilio account and phone number
- An IFTTT account
- An SMS-enabled mobile phone
- You text your own personal org-mode unicorn number
- The thing you texted gets appended to a file in Dropbox you specify
- You'll see it next time you open up org-mode
The code is super simple, but you'll have to do a bit of setup on Twilio and IFTTT.
Sign up for a Twilio account, and snag a new phone number.
Sign up for an IFTTT account and install this recipe - make sure to note the URL it gives you! You'll need it in a sec.
If you want to just deploy this to Heroku (the free tier is more than enough for an applcation only you are using), click the button above and enter the two config variables you need:
IFTTT_DROPBOX_URL, the IFTTT Maker URL you got when creating the above recipe
ALLOWED_INCOMING_NUMBER, the phone number that's allowed to add inbox items (+15555555555)
and then take your new instance's incoming URL (e.g., .herokuapp.com/incoming) and set that in Twilio as the webhook for when the number receives a text message.
That's it! Shoot a text message to your shiny new inbox and make sure it shows up in your Dropbox folder that you set when setting up the IFTTT recipe.
You can, of course, deploy this anywhere you'd want. I just used Heroku because I knew it'd be easy to replicate and it'll run easily on the free tier.
It takes the Heroku instance a little over 15 seconds to awake once it gets some traffic coming its way. Unfortunately,
Twilio's incoming message API has a 15-second timeout, so you're going to get an HTTP 11200 error because it'll think the
server is unresponsive, and you won't get the "Got it!" message. Any subsequent messages before it falls asleep again
will provide the right confirmation message.
The important thing is that your input gets logged, which is still the case.
Honestly, when I'm out-and-about, I never really need to find or read these TODOs or notes, so I just built what I needed. Also, see below.
Great question! This started out as an exercise to get some experience with deploying a Clojure application.
While this app is more than is necessary right now, having an explicit backend also allows for further functionality to be built out later (like finding notes).
Send me a PR, why not?
Use at your own risk, I have by no means tested this extensively.
org-mode-sms-inbox
Copyright (C) 2016 Daniel Guilak
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.
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