TL;DR

Another tool for hobby-scale projects.

In Software Tools for Hobby-Scale Projects we took a look at an intetesting page related to… software tools for hobby-scale projects.

As it happens, that page is showing some wear after a few years, and not all those services are still up.

One such service is REFL.ME - it’s supposed to be a mobile phone app, but I can’t find it in the “official channels”.

So I thought that I already have an app that can channel some notifications for me - the Telegram app.

That’s an App that I don’t control, and chances are that you (the reader) don’t either. An interesting reading.

The basic idea for implementing this notification system is the following:

• we create a notification topic, e.g. heads-up-folks
• people interested into the notifications subscribe to the topic
• when a notification must be sent, a POST or a GET are sent to a specific URL, which takes care to forward the message to the subscribers.

Yes, this really is Warm Water 2.0!

Anyway, it takes very little to get up to speed:

1. Look for @know_tee_bot.
2. Create the topic with /create heads-up-folks –it should answer with OK.
3. Get the details about the newly created topic with command /show heads-up-folks –it should answer something like this:

Topic «heads-up-folks» in tenant «default» (subscribed):
- pub: https://know-tee.introm.it/publish/7a8a383191417312ebb6de8be3ed4468/heads-up-folks/af25aa74cef0a49e809b28b599c96dba
- sub: /join 7a8a383191417312ebb6de8be3ed4468 heads-up-folks e0f0338245a8ab221eabd4ecf97f0b78

That’s it. As the creator of the topic, your Telegram account is automatically subscribed to it. At this point, you can use the pub URI to send notifications, and receive them through the Telegram client:

# url is set to the long "pub" url above
url='https://know-tee.introm.it/publish/.../heads-up-folks/...'

# GET
curl "$url?text=whatever+you+want"

# POST
curl "$url" --data-urlencode 'text=whatever you want'

In case you want others to be notified too, it’s possible to give them the sub part shown above. Copy-pasting the /join ... command above should be sufficient.

Be aware that, as anything in the internet, this endpoint might disappear all of a sudden, or limit the number of topics, or restrict you in other ways… so don’t rely on it 😅

You have been… notified!