Get Only the Notifications You Want, the Way You Want Them
Find a Cheap Fare to SOMEWHERE
Many travel websites post interesting deals, or other information that you may care about. For example, Secret Flying posts mistake fares and other unusually good airfare deals. But, very few people want to check a website, sometimes multiple times per day, to see what is new.
Most of these websites have the option of signing up for a daily or weekly email, or you can follow them on Twitter or Facebook. These built-in mechanisms may be exactly what you are interested in. But, sometimes they don’t act the way you want them to. For example, you may want to be notified about something as soon as it happens, you may only be interested in some of the items being posted, or you may want to be informed in a different way than the website makes available.
By taking advantage of the right tools, you can make sure that you receive notifications about the things that you care about, and that you get notified the way you want to.
For example, you can receive a text message when Secret Flying posts a deal directly from your home airport, rather than, or in addition to, a daily email with deals from all over the country.
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Using IFTTT
Several of the techniques described below take advantage of a tool called “If This Than That” (IFTTT). This service allows you to set up a set of rules, called “applets”, that run on Internet, on your behalf. The first part of each rule tells the IFTTT service what you want to monitor. The second part tells the service what to do when the event happens. For example, you could set up a rule that sends you an email when each baseball game ends, or one that automatically tweets, whenever you make a new post on a Facebook page.
There are a huge number of different things that you can use to “trigger” your rule, and a huge number of different things you can do, when the rule is triggered, each taking advantage of built-in integration with hundreds of popular devices and online services. It is very easy to set up your own rules, and you can even take advantage of premade rules created by others.
To get started, you need to go to IFTTT.com and register for a free account. There are also free apps available for your phone. This is particularly useful if you have an Android phone, because you can set up rules that act on, or are triggered by, a variety of phone-based events—such as automatically forwarding your phone when arrive at your house. However, all the scenarios we cover only require a web-based account.
Press the new applet button to create a new rule, and you’ll be taken to the first screen. Press on “this” to get started.
Getting an instant email or text message
Typical email newsletters aren’t the best way to be notified about time-sensitive information. By the time you receive the email, it may be too late. Depending on the way that you use Facebook, their built-in notification mechanism may or may not be effective for you. If you want to be sure to be notified as soon as something happens, your best option is to set up an IFTTT rule.
- Triggering the notification based on a tweet. In many cases, a website will tweet each time they post new information. This makes it easy to set up your rule. Just click on the Twitter service, which will be at the very top of the trigger choices, select the “New tweet by a specific user” trigger, and add the Twitter feed you care about.
- Triggering the notification based on an RSS feed.
If the website doesn’t tweet, or if their tweets are somehow delayed, there is a good chance that the website has an RSS feed that you can use for your trigger instead. An RSS feed is a stream of stories that are published by the website, so that they can be viewed in specialized tools. IFTTT can monitor the stream, and trigger a rule when a new story is published. Just like the website itself, each feed has a “URL” such as www.secretflying.com/usa-deals/feed. The first step for setting up your RSS trigger is to find that URL, often by looking for, and clicking, the little RSS icon on the webpage. - Control how you want to be notified. Once you’ve set up the trigger, you can control how you want to be notified. You can receive an email, a text message, a phone call, or a directed tweet. Click on the “that” button to choose how your new rule should notify you. Then choose the option you want, and fill in the necessary details, like your email address.
Then, in IFFFT, select the “New Feed Item’ trigger, and enter the URL of the RSS feed.
Filtering the notifications you receive
If you don’t want to be notified about every post or alert, no problem, you can make an IFTTT rule that only triggers if the tweet or post contains a keyword. In our Secret Flyer example, you may only want to receive a notification if the amazing fare post contains the name of your home airport. All you need to do is to choose a slightly different IFTTT trigger.
For the Twitter Search trigger, you will be asked for a search string. You need to enter the words you are looking for plus the world “From:” immediately followed by the Twitter user name you want to monitor. For example, to get just posts about Seattle on Secret Flyer, you would enter “Seattle from:SecretFlyer”.
Guaranteeing you get notifications about Facebook posts
If you use Facebook a lot, you might want to receive notification directly in your Facebook feed. Just “liking” the source’s Facebook page is not enough. There is no guarantee that all their posts will show up in your feed.
However, if you press the “Liked” button again, you’ll see a pop-up menu, that gives you control over notifications. If you check the “See First” and “All On (All Posts, Events) choices” options, you’ll be sure to see every post from that source.