DCI Event Score Push Notifications (the old way)

Jan 9 2016 update: I discontinued CorpScores before the 2015 season because I joined the Blue Devils International Corps and didn’t have time (or internet access) during the season to manage it. Fortunately Drum Corps Planet released the DrumScorps app and DCI released native apps for iOS and Android as well.

The app is live at corpscores.herokuapp.com, the scraper runs on a separate VPS. I still need to make a lot of usability changes, but the core functionality is working.

Problem

DCI doesn’t have an Android app or a mobile-friendly website. This makes checking scores after competitions very difficult for mobile users. This is a problem because corps members check scores often and almost always do so on mobile devices.

Band-Aid Solution

I’m building a service that sends SMS messages with the latest event scores as they are posted. This is another Flask app. I’m also taking this opportunity to learn how to use Travis-CI, pytest, a different module structure, Flask Blueprints, an application generator, and maybe Docker for deployment. The code may be a bit messy until I figure all of that out. You can view current progress on Github.

Challenge

Score information will come from an HTML scraper (thanks BeautifulSoup). Making it robust will be difficult, and there is always the possibility that the website format is changed midway through the season.

Cost

This is a For-The-Good-Of-The-Order project (zero revenue), I’m trying to minimize my costs. Part of that strategy is using email-to-SMS gateways instead of paying per-text for a service like Twilio.

Email-To-SMS

Email-to-SMS isn’t split out into an independent library (it relies on the Flask-Mail plugin currently), but the the carrier info is available in a convenient python dict here. Entries are in the format:

"carrier_slug": {
    "name": "Carrier Name",
    "suffix": "@<carrier_gateway_email>.com"
}

If you want to send a message, simply concatenate the 10 digit phone number (with no punctuation) to the carrier suffix. Send an email with the message contents to that address:

'[email protected]'

I obtained this info from brendanlim/sms-fu, I just made a Python version from the YAML. Some entries are probably outdated and nonfunctional, let me know if you run into a broken one.