Track your mileage via text messages

One of my personal projects in the last few months has been creating a new website to "scratch my own itch." I drive a relatively fuel-efficient car, a 2001 Honday Civic. I've got friends who drive cars, both greener and not so much, which tell them what their gas mileage is. But Bob, my car's name, doesn't do that. There are gadgets I could buy to do it, and of course I could just keep a notebook in my car and jot down the numbers, but I write websites and gosh darnit, this called for one.

If I had had an iPhone, I could have used a number of different web or twitter based sites. But my phone, like my car, is rather basic. I wanted to be able to send in my odometer reading, and how much gas I bought, and have it tell me what my mileage was for that tank, and what my average is for all my fill-ups. Luckily there are a few sites that make it pretty easy to receive text messages into a web application.

So after one night's work to get the basics going, and about a month of tweaking and testing with friends, I'm pretty happy with the first version of my SMS mileage tracker. All you need to do is, the next time you fill up your tank, send a text message to 41411 with the word "EMPG" at the start, followed by your odometer reading, and then the number of gallons of gas you bought. It'll reply with your mileage and store each fill-up in a database so your average can be calculated for future fill-ups.