More SMS Requests
 

Since the current SMS thread is closed, I thought I'd open a new one (I searched for any that were still open).

I'd like to suggest a small enhancement. Perhaps a lettering or numbering system so you can use it with more than one vehicle. Right now you have:

[distance] [cost] [volume] [p optional] [notes optional], So how about:
[Vehicle letter optional] [cost] [volume] [p optional] [notes optional]?

Vehicle letter if not specified would use the default vehicle, but you could assign a letter to a vehicle in your profile, or it could just label it for you. So you have car A, car B, motorcycle C, etc. So if you post:
B 200 20.00 10, then that would be vehicle B that was filled. Should be really easy to detect a leading letter I'd think. What are your thoughts?

Also, I'm not sure if it was mentioned, but being able to use more than one cell number would be great too, such as couples that share a car (and have different phones).

Great site! Thanks for putting it together and offering these enhancements!

Yeah, that seems like an elegant solution to multiple vehicles via SMS. You could assign an [A-Z] letter to represent a vehicle, and choose something memorable. I'd use P for my Prius and R for my RAV4. And if you don't use the letter the fuel-up would just go to your primary vehicle.

We didn't want to use numbers because they seemed so arbitrary—not to mention difficult to parse out from a distance value.

And yeah, I hear ya on more phone numbers. I think we can add a field for one more.

ok, this is all set! Edit your vehicle profile to set a SMS shortcut letter and you can add it to the beginning of your text to specify that vehicle.

I also added a field for a 2nd phone number, so you can fuel-up from two different phones.

Wanted to add a bug about the SMS system. It seems that it records the current server time for the fuel-up as opposed to whatever time system my profile is set up for.

I would like to see the system check what my time settings are so it knows when I went to fuel up.

Otherwise, I've had no problems the SMS works great!

Yeah, we don't support time zones for fuel-ups at this time. The best we can do right now is show you the time with your offset from server time. Where are you seeing the wrong time? Maybe we missed a calculation somewhere.

I agree it'd be better to record everything in the database in UTC and do the calculation from there—we just aren't there yet.

This rocks! Thanks pb.

So I did an SMS fuel up at 5:30pm (EST). When I went to check my profile on the website it shows up as 2:30pm.

Again, not a huge issue just something I noticed.

ah, ok. We don't show the time the fuel-up was added very many places so we just missed it. If you have a time offset set in your user profile, you should see the correct time for your timezone now on your fuel-up log.

Note: the letter must be lower-case for it to work, in case your phone automatically capitalizes the first letter of your text.

oh, we'll get that fixed.

ok, it should accept a capital A-Z now.

Awesome job on that! I updated the letters on all my vehicles. However, I think you need some kind of reminder note on the site to tell people of this update. I didn't see the change until I went to edit my vehicle text and then spotted it.

Also, I looked over the help on SMS article, to see if it works as I suggested, but found it was not updated, so you may want to update that article too so others know of your enhancements :)

I'm glad you liked the suggestion.

Thanks again for the great improvements!

Oh and it looks like I made a tiny mistake in my description, I omitted [distance]. I'm sure you got it right though...

I had:

[Vehicle letter optional] [cost] [volume] [p optional] [notes optional]?

But it should be:

[Vehicle letter optional] [distance] [cost] [volume] [p optional] [notes optional]

That is what you implemented right? So:

c 200 3.00 10.0 p half-full

would mean, partially filled vehicle c, with odo reading of 200 mi (or if that vehicle is set for trip odo, then at 200 miles used), $3.00 a gallon (or liter, etc), 10.0 gal (or liters), comment "half-full".

Do I have it right?

Which help were you looking at zbret? The FAQ entry here is up to date.

You have it right, but that p for partial needs to be attached the volume unit without a space. So your example text should be: c 200 3.00 10.0p half-full.

oh, I see now that our old development blog post on SMS fuel-ups hasn't been updated. I added a link to our current FAQ entry there.

Thanks again!

And the fact that p for partial fill can't have a space, makes sense and answers an unasked question I had about how to parse "p" from partial vs "p" from comments. You can tell the difference because the comments has a space before it. Sorry, my geek side getting out :)