homemade push notifications

[ironymaiden]

one of the things that facebook does is it prods you about activity it thinks you might be interested in. the technical term for those things showing up at the top of your phone screen is "push notifications". DW doesn't have a phone app, and doesn't have the newfangled ability that some websites do to send notifications on their own. but DW will send you ALL THE EMAILS if you tell it to. and from there, your email client can send you the push notifications. boom, DW is prodding you to go interact with your friends.

this is written for Gmail and the Gmail Inbox app.

part one: go tick the boxes here under "also notify me by email". siderea tells you how to get more emails (i know it's a wall of text about filters, that's useful too, scan for "tracking") and how to be double-sure you get all the emails.

part two: (this is important) sign in to the Gmail website on a regular computer. (i spent way too much time trying to get it to show me the desktop website on a tablet. it won't.)
once you have some DW emails in your inbox, follow the create a filter instructions. you want to add a label to every DW email for which you would like push notifications. fortunately, DW seems to have a single "from" address, so it's a pretty simple rule.

part three: tell the Inbox app to notify you when you get email with the DW label. instructions here, you want "labeled and bundled email"

it works. go forth and enjoy DW like it's 2012.

Comments

[butterflydreaming]

Awesome. This is the kind of posts that makes me want reblogging as a function, though in general I am quite happy to leave Tumblr style on tumblr.

[ironymaiden]

feel free to share however you see fit, i want it spread far and wide. it works really well for me. i'm immediately reading, responding, and engaging in comment threads.

[butterflydreaming]

The responding-by-email-reply has been a favorite thing for me. Mobile is my internet these days, and it's nice to be able to have a conversation with ease.

[ironymaiden]

yes! my "fun internet" time is often on the bus.

[butterflydreaming]

Anyway, I'm really glad you're liking it here. Have you noticed the "track" function? (I don't recall LJ having that.) I know it's available on communities. I think it's just communities.

[ironymaiden]

Oh no, it's on everything. So I've tracked everyone in my circle (at least I think I have, I can't find a way to do it in bulk) and I get a push notification when there's a new post.

[cesy]

Some tracking is a paid account feature, but DW gives more of it to free accounts than LJ did. It's on journals as well as communities for paid accounts.

[butterflydreaming]

Thanks for this! I currently only have a free account, and I can track journals and communities. Without looking up the details, I suspect the limitation is on the quantity, like icons.

[azurelunatic]

I believe that single-thread-tracking for comments where you're only interested in one branch of the discussion (like a kink meme or love meme, perhaps) is a paid feature; free accounts would have to track all the comments to that entry. And the community feature, track all comments in this community, is for paid communities only.