notification
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🔔 notifications on the IndieWeb refer to ways a personal site receives, stores, displays, and pushes messages indicating something of interest like responses to posts, homepage mentions, or upcoming events & RSVPs.
From a developer perspective, a web site receives messages indicating something of interest (server notifications), and displays those messages (preferably in realtime) either in a list on a page, or pushed to one or more devices used by the owner of that site (client notifications). Protocols used:
Why
There are numerous use cases for notifications. Many of these are timely and also use cases for push notifications.
Personal use-cases
- alarms
- calendar reminders - your site noticing your upcoming events and RSVPs and sending you an event reminder with details inline and URL for more info / comment / option to change RSVP.
- text messages from contacts - your site receives indieweb-messaging from another site
- social web notifications - potentially every kind of webmention —
Warning: be careful to avoid creating notification fatigue for yourself- follow - someone has started following your homepage and sent a webmention accordingly
- like - someone liked or favorited one of your posts or homepage
- comment - someone commented on one of your posts
- repost - someone reposted one of your posts
- mention - someone wrote a post that mentioned you (via linking to your homepage, perhaps even marked it up as an h-card)
- follow-up comment - someone commented on something you commented on, or liked.
- person-tag - someone person-tagged you in a post, especially a photo
Public info use-cases
- Amber Alert text messages
- Weather alerts per http://www.nws.noaa.gov/com/weatherreadynation/wea.html
- Sports scores (realtime, e.g. World Cup goals)
Why not
Beware of real world problems occurring in notification systems elsewhere:
Too Many Notifications
Lists of notifications can be overwhelming, even if they are polled.
Receiving too many notifications can make people not want to use software or services.
Related:
Why not push notifications
- Anxiety and fear
- Distraction
See: push notifications: Why not for more details.
IndieWeb Examples
gRegor Morrill
gRegor Morrill has a notifications page (currently calling it a "responses" page) at http://gregorlove.com/responses/ since 2016-05.
- Primarily for me to have a quick look at recently-received webmentions + local comments.
- Includes homepage webmentions, though no additional processing is done on them, e.g. person-tag.
- If logged in as an admin, includes webmentions that have not been processed yet and those marked as private, e.g. unapproved local comments
- Currently shows latest 20; may add pagination to go back further.
sknebel
Sven Knebel has a private IRC server where a bot (based on TikTokBot [reports new webmentions].
Aaron Parecki
Aaron Parecki has a private IRC server where notifications of new webmentions are reported.
Jeremy Cherfas
Jeremy Cherfas uses an IFTTT applet to monitor the output of webmention.herokuapp.com via Granary to send himself an email whenever his site receives a webmention.
Previous Examples
Aaron Parecki
On Aaron Parecki's previous website, there was a /mentions page that listed received webmentions in reverse chronological order. The page is archived at http://2015.aaronparecki.com/mentions
