Patrick's Rants

I have been searching around for a free solution to a minor problem. The problem is snow days or snow delays. The school district posts snow day schedules online but there are lots of people who don’t bother to check the web site, or listen to the radio or watch TV including some of our own employees. A “simple” solution would be a system that first would alert our drivers that the schedule has been changed through text messaging. That way up to 80 phone calls could be averted in favor of 80 text messages. Advancing such a system to begin alerting parents would save hundreds if not thousands of phone calls answered,

“Transportation, school’s canceled”

whereby there is usually one of two responses. The first,

“Is it a two hour delay?”

“No. School’s canceled.”

“School’s canceled?”

“Yes.”

“Oh. OK.”

<click>
Or, just <click>
I envision a system that allows people to register their phone number with multiple levels, Transportation employees who tend to be up earlier and might need different kinds of alerts, other district employees and parents. I’ve found some programs that would allow some of this and others might be able to be bent to work, but nothing “out of the box” so to speak especially when you consider that I’m also thinking that a web based system would be best – and our web server is a Mandriva box so it has to be a *nix based solution… that kills the $29.95 solution from Notepage which looks like it covers most everything except, of course, the the fact that it runs on Windows . And digging a little more I notice that at least one solution has a per-pager licensing structure.
I suppose a package that will send a text to the phone through an email interface could work, but the mailing list solutions that I’m familiar with (Mailman) require some sort of two way authentication that may or may not work so well when we’re talking about phones and text messages.

If anyone has experience with a Linux based solution that isn’t too cumbersome, I’m interested in hearing about it.