I added a widget to every page here that lets anyone in the world immediately send me a notification. Type a message, hit send, and it’ll pop up on my phone, watch, and computer near instantly.

Is this a good idea? No. But it’s a funny idea, and that’s all that counts these days. Scroll to the bottom of this page if you want to give it a try.

Some ways I could easily expand this if it goes well

• Allow blank messages. Remember the Facebook poke button? Is that still a thing? I could make it a thing again.
• Mark your message as urgent. It will override my phone’s volume setting and ring nonstop until I acknowledge it.
• Arbitrary file uploads. This is a joke. Even I’m not stupid enough to implement that. Probably.

Tech details

The setup is absolutely nothing fancy, the widget just sends your message and which page you’re on to a ntfy server I have. I’m subscribed to the message topic on my phone and in my testing the messages come in within a second or two.

There are multiple ways it could be abused which I’m already aware of. Some of them would be funny. I’d still appreciate it if you don’t though.

— JP