Twitter updates via satellite phone

I have been thinking about various ways to keep those at home up to speed with what I’m doing in the field. Obviously, the easiest is to find a payphone, which is probably the most ideal. However, fossil hunting quickly takes one away from all landlines (and cell towers), leaving me with just satellites as a way to get messages out. I have seen the Spot Personal Tracker, which has some nifty features, but it runs off the Globalstar satellite network, which doesn’t cover polar regions unfortunately. This leaves me with the Iridium network, for which we currently have a sat phone. We could theoretically set up the phone as a modem, but the complications of that, as well as the data lag and speed, make it relatively unattractive. What I had thought of before was to somehow set up a system which could update a webpage when it recieved a text message (as the sat phone can send SMS messages). This way, we could possibly update a map with our coordinates, have short messages about what we found, and simply let all the significant others know that everyone is still OK. I had thought of this before I had really heard of Twitter, but because the platform is so open, someone has even created a WordPress (the software that runs this site) plugin to update your blog when it recieves a Twitter update. Theoretically this plugin would do more or less what I wanted, but I will have to wait to try it out as I can’t add the plugin to this specific blog because of certain restrictions. Hopefully I can figure something out for the future, but even if all I do is post tweets from the field, it could still be a good way of letting people what’s going on.