rsbowman / smsly

Simple static website from text messages

Smsly

Static website, from text messages

Problem: I want to remember the beautiful moments from day to day, capturing pictures and videos and thoughs as I go along. But I'm lazy. Probably won't keep up with a traditional journal/website/blog.

However, I do always have my phone on me, and I'm constantly texting people pictures and videos and little messages. Why not do the same to an address that collects these and makes a cute little static website out of them?

That's what Smsly does. It also has a dumb name. It's also completely unsupported, hard to get working, and may delete all your files. Use at your own peril.

To use smsly you'll need at least these things:

• Flask, Flask-FlatPages, Frozen-Flask
• avconv (for transcoding video)
• s3cmd (if you want to host your website on Amazon S3)
• PIL or Pillow

Setup (Roughly)

You'll want to rename config_example.py to config.py and change it to suit your needs. Set up an email account accessible by IMAP (I'm using a gmail account, you may need to make modifications to from_email.py if you're using a different provider). The main program fetches new emails from this account, stores them along with their attachements in the location you described in the config.py, and, if there are new emails, renders the site and uploads it to S3. There are some various conveniences along the way, such as markdown support and a whitelist (to make sure no Viagra commercials end up on your website).

Note that you'll need a pretty recent version of avconv in order to transcode video to formats readable by desktop browsers and mobile phones. I had to compile mine with lots of weird codecs, too, but I'm sure you can figure that out.

Good luck!