28 March 2017

How I Made the SMS Viewable (Kind of Techie,)

First, I used SMS Backup and Restore to save the SMS messages.

Then I viewed the XML file generated in Firefox, using the following style sheets I downloaded for a threaded view. (Direct link)

If you put the contents of the zip file in the same directory as the xml file.

It would would then show up on Firefox as this:



At this point, I thought that it was there, but I was wrong.

Basically, there was no way for me to get it out.

It did not copy and paste properly, and so I knew that the information was there, I just didn't know how to extract it to a blog post.

It turns out that if I use the link with the style sheets from above, there is one that generates a table in Firefox, and I can cut and past into an excel table, and there it is, with the sender, date, and content, whcih means that I can use my (not particularly) mad skillz at Excel text manipulation to generate the html code which set my stuff flush right, his flush left, added avatars, and had different background colors.

It also means that reordering texts to better reflect the order of the conversation (latency is a bitch)is easier:  Just insert a blank row, move the row there, and delete the now blank row.

Purists out there may object to my abuse of the table tag, which you can see on my earlier post if you look at the html code.

All in all, it comes pretty close to the way that it looks on my phone.

Still, it is a remarkably fugly way to do things, but fugly is what I do.

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