Subscribe to Military Fitness Blog on your phone with tagga

Millitary.com is an online community for American military personal, their families, and veterans.  It’s a pretty cool site and it has seen tremendous usage in the USA, with over ten million registered members.  What makes Military.com even cooler, is that they’ve added tagga ‘Subscribe to Mobile’ widgets to some of their blogs.  ‘Subscribe to Mobile’ lets users subscribe to a blog’s RSS feed on their mobile phones.  Users get an SMS text message whenever there is a new post and can also click on the short URL in the SMS message to read the full post on a mobile formatted website.  Check out Military.com’s Military Fitness blog and see if you can spot the ‘Send to Mobile’ button.

Chris Richardson
tagga.com developer

Text to save a life, surgery via sms

Text SURGERY to 82442 for daily surgery instructions via SMS.  First up tomorrow, appendix removal!  Next, get that circumcision you’ve always wanted!

Obviously I am just kidding, but it has really happened, a doctor actually performed a successful surgery from sms instructions.  Engadget posted about it today, a British surgeon volunteering in the Democratic Republic of Congo performed a surgery he had never performed before from SMS instructions sent by a colleague in the UK.  This is truly an amazing story and proof of the power of SMS, who knew it could save lives?

Chris Richardson
tagga.com developer

The shiny new tagga SMS API

Big news from tagga, we released a free SMS messaging API this week! The tagga API lets developers send SMS text messages to their users, receive SMS text messages from their users, create taggs, and dynamically update taggs.  See below for an overview of our API features:

Send Message - Learn More
The Send Message API function lets developers send free SMS text messages to mobile users via a simple HTTP POST.  Developers can only send to users who have opted into the developers program.

Dynamic tagg Update - Learn More
The Dynamic Update API function lets developers update the message content of any tagg on the fly. This function is particularly useful when used to update Newsletter taggs, which updates all subscribers when the Newsletter content is changed.

Create tagg - Learn More
The Create tagg API function lets developers automatically create taggs and mobile websites without visiting tagga.com. This feature is particularly useful for sites with groups of users who want to create Newsletter taggs that send updates to all users in a group. This feature will also be attractive to listing sites seeking to mobilize via SMS campaigns and mobile websites.

Two Way Messaging - Learn More
The Two Way Messaging API platform will allow developers to receive messages from their users and respond accordingly, for free. Developers will receive an HTTP POST from us when their users send a message to their keyword; the developer can then dynamically decide what content to return to the user. The tagga API provides developers with tools to send and receive SMS messages to and from their users.

Check out all the details and sign up for the API!

Note that the API is only free to developers and that standard messaging rates apply to SMS recipients.

If our API doesn’t tickle your fancy you might be interested in some of our other developer tools, check them out on our Developer page.

Please contact us with any questions or suggestions and feel free to send us links to your apps.  We’d love to see the tagga API in action!

Chris Richardson
tagga.com developer

Tagga Send to Mobile Wordpress Plugin

Our new ‘Send to Mobile’ WordPress Plugin was recently accepted into the WordPress Plugins directory.  We’ve already had 64 downloads, which is great to see!  What the ‘Send to Mobile’ Plugin does is add a tagga “Send to Mobile” button to the end of each post or page.  Users wanting to send the post or page content to their mobile device can click on the button to do so.  For an example of the plugin in action, check out the ‘Send to Mobile’ button at the bottom of this post.  Check out our Tools Page for more information.

To install the ‘Send to Mobile’ WordPress Plugin:

1. Download the Wordpress Plugin.
2. Unzip file into /wp-content/plugins/ directory.
3. Go to wp-admin panel of your WordPress site and click on “Plugins”.
4. Activate plugin “Tagga - send to mobile” by clicking “Activate”.

It’s as easy as that.

Chris Richardson
tagga.com developer

Blogathon Vancouver 2008 Wrapup

Three weeks ago tagga participated in Vancouver’s 2008 Blogathon for charity, which involved a blog post every half hour for 24 hours.  It kept me up all night, but we got through it and have so far raised $650 for the Lochmaddy Foundation, a worthy cause.  Today is the last day of our fund raising effort via Dreambank, so please feel free to donate at the last minute to help us reach our $1000 goal.  Did I mention it was for a good cause?  Check out the tagga dream.

If you are interested in reading all 49 of my blogathon posts, and you probably are, the first one is here.

Chris Richardson
tagga.com developer

Internet Explorer 6 not supported, try Firefox

We at tagga decided not to support Internet Explorer 6 because of the headache it would have caused us to customize our code (namely css and JavaScript) specifically for it.  We had enough trouble with IE7 as it was…  Indeed, there are a great deal of CSS bugs related specifically to the internet explorer family.

Many websites are starting to pull support for IE6, which remains a controversial decision seeing as estimates show a quarter of the internet are still using it.  It wasn’t a hard decision for us though, the troubles supporting IE6 would have caused were just not worth it.  You might call us lazy, but we think we are doing our users a favor by recommending Firefox3:)  Also, not many early adopters use IE6, preferring the latest technology.

I apologize to any IE6 users who have come across tagga and had difficulties.  To you I recommend Firefox3, which I think you will enjoy.

Chris Richardson
tagga.com developer

Server Problems Fixed

Thanks to some great press from TechCrunch and Mashable yesterday, we’ve had some trouble handling the load caused by the extraordinary traffic volume.  If you’ve attempted to visit tagga.com in the past 24 hours, you’ll know what I’m talking about.  Our site has either been down or deathly slow, but we think we’ve fixed the problem.  We are back up and running now and the site is quite responsive.  We hope that you’ll give us another shot now that we’ve upgraded our infrastructure and (hopefully) left our load problems behind.  Please let us know if you run into any problems by emailing us at support[at]tagga.com.  We hope you enjoy a fully operational tagga!

Chris Richardson
tagga developer

WE DID IT, WE’VE LAUNCHED!

The team here at tagga is really excited that we can finally share with you what we have been working on in stealth. Keeping this quiet and under wraps has been really hard – mostly because we like what we have built and we hope you do to.

We are launching the first mobile bookmarking platform! Tagg is a free service that lets anyone tag real world items and web snippets to their mobile phone.

With Tagga, you can:

-Create a text message campaign to tagg your favorite restaurant; sell your car; update people of your next music gig or your sports tournament
-Surf the web, find some content you want to take with you, and then click to send to phone. It’s a “Look Ma! No pen” tool
-Subscribe to news feeds that you like and get the data on your mobile
-Advertise
-Make money by publishing with tagga tools on your website
-Follow other taggers

If you want to get your own keyword (e.g. TEXT SARAH to 82442), you’d best hurry. It’s first come first serve. See our recent coverage in TechCrunch.

We hope you like it. If you don’t, tell us. We are always open to comments and feedback.

‘tagg ya later

tagga team

tagga launch

It’s an exciting week for us here at tagga, we plan on launching late next week.  If you haven’t already guessed, our service has to do with SMS.  We are creating a means for marketers to setup mobile advertising campaigns for free, if they so choose.  We are also creating a site for consumers to view and mobilize web content.  We are pretty excited about it.  If you are a marketer looking to start a mobile advertising campaign or a web content publisher looking to get your content out there (and make some money), be sure to check out tagga near the end of the week.  We hope you’ll like what you find!

Chris Richardson
tagga developer

Text ‘Chris’ to 82442

Text ‘Chris’ to 82442 (TAGGA) and see what happens.  Do it, I dare you.  Wait, I should have said that it will only work in the USA and Canada.  If you did it, you should be seeing the copy from my business card on your phone right now.  That is one example of what tagga can do.  That was completely free and only took me a minute to setup.

Chris Richardson
tagga developer