If you click the little bell icon in the corner of your screen, you can sign up for instant notifications. What kind of notifications does this send?
These are browser push notifications. On most systems the notification will show for a few seconds, before tucking itself into the notification center/tray, where you can still click it later. The notification shows you the title of our latest published article along with our icon. Clicking it opens the link directly to the new article, completely bypassing social media oligarchs and their greedy grubby fingers.
Do you have to give your email?
No. This is the key difference from a standard email newsletter. Web push notifications collect absolutely no personal information—no email addresses, no names, nothing.
In fact, if you had already subscribed via email, I’ve gone ahead and deleted your email from the database to keep your data safe. You will have to resubscribe using the bell instead.
When you click “Subscribe” your browser generates an anonymous subscription token. This is basically a random ID that simply tells us, “This specific browser agreed to receive updates from our site.” It uses a service worker, a small background script the browser installs for our site. That service worker is what lets notifications arrive even when our site isn’t open.
The beauty of doing it this way is that you keep your inbox private. You only receive notifications exactly where you want them, like on your personal phone or home computer instead of your work computer and out of your email! You can expect around two updates a week, and you can unsubscribe whenever you want.