Blog

Although the latest blog post was published more than 8 months ago, Notifier is still alive and maintained. I just haven't added any big features to write about.

If you've got any questions or concerns drop me a line at hi@notifier.in.

By the way, the most recent notification was processed just 1 minute ago.

Set title for webhook notifications

When sending notifications to a webhook, now you can also specify a notification title via the X-Notification-Title HTTP header.

For example:
curl -X POST -H "X-Notification-Title: Test title" -d 'Test body' https://notifier.in/webhook/...

The title and body will be displayed in the RSS feed as shown below: Example of webhook notification title

Published on April 1

RSS summaries with ChatGPT

With the help of ChatGPT, Notifier can now provide succinct summaries of your RSS feeds. This feature will save you time and ensure that you get the essential information from your feeds without having to read through every single article.

To enable this feature, on a new RSS summary integration page enter the URL of your RSS feed. Notifier will then fetch the latest articles from your feed and summarize them using ChatGPT.

It's available only for paid users. You can get summaries for up to 300 articles per month.

Published on July 26, 2023

End of Telegram support

Unfortunately, after struggling for a couple of weeks to fix the Telegram integrations, I decided to stop supporting them because of the following two reasons:

  1. It isn't so easy to fetch Telegram messages anymore because of various measures Telegram has implemented to prevent message scrapping.
  2. There aren't so many users using Notifier's Telegram integration.

As I'm using Telegram integrations extensively myself, I had to find another solution. BazQux Reader seems like a good one. I'm using it for several years as my RSS reader and it was quite a nice experience.

If you have used Notifier only for Telegram integrations, please contact me and I'll issue you a refund for the remaining days.

Published on December 12, 2022

Downtime + lost messages

Today while doing some maintenance on my server, it stopped responding to any commands after a restart. I tried to fix it, but unfortunately, it wasn't possible. So I had to buy a new server and set up everything from scratch. The Notifier was down from 11:25 (UTC) until ≈15:30.

Since I couldn't restore the database, I had to use one of the latest backups. Thus the data about the RSS feeds, users, etc that have been changed/added since ≈2022-03-06 00:00 UTC has been lost, unfortunately. The good thing is that I could recover email messages (as they're stored on the disk), but they just aren't visible in the feeds. So if you expected to get some important message today but don't see it in the RSS feed, please contact me at hi@notifier.in. I'll try to find it.

I'm sorry for the inconvenience! Let me know if you have got any questions.

Published on March 6, 2022

Email attachments

Hey 👋

Almost 1 year passed since the latest blog post. Notifier is still active, I just haven't added any big features until today, mostly fixed bugs and answered customer emails.

Now Notifier supports email attachments. They're displayed at the beginning of an email:

Attached files: sphere.mp4, 4.jpeg
To access them you have to have a paid account. The file size limit for each attachment is 10 MB.

I also fixed embedded attached images. Previously, if a sender embedded such an image it displayed broken.

Published on May 1, 2020

May Updates

Now you can pay for your premium subscription annually. It costs 40 € per year. Here you can switch to the annual billing cycle.

I improved the new messages check script, so Telegram messages would appear in RSS feeds with a less delay than before. I also fixed the rare bug which stopped some Telegram integration update at all.

If you're subscribed to a lot of Telegram channels, and the limit of 20 Telegram integrations is too low for you, now you can increase it. For 6 €/month or 60 €/year, you can get 50 Telegram integrations. And for 10 €/month or 100 €/year, you can get 100 integrations. Let me know if you'd like to increase this limit.

Published on June 3, 2019

April Updates

New Telegram parser

At the beginning of April, I released a new Telegram message parser, which I re-wrote from scratch. It has better support of various Telegram message types, easily extendable, and more thoroughly tested. For you, it means that your Telegram RSS feeds would have better message formatting and less "Notifier doesn’t support such message type" errors. In case you notice some bug, please drop me a line at hi@notifier.in.

Other updates

I’ve added a comment form to blog posts and the FAQ page. Feel free post comments and ask questions!

I’ve made some internal improvements and added more tests. So in general Notifier should be more stable now.

Also, Notifier.in got a new logo ↑. Thanks to Evgeny Filatov for creating it!

Published on May 1, 2019

How I lost and recovered messages

TL;DR: From April 12, 1 PM (UTC) until April 13, 9 AM the integration RSS feeds missed some messages.

On Friday, April 12 around 1 PM (UTC) I accidentally ran an update script in the wrong directory, which resulted in deleting some files with messages.

Fortunately, all files are backed up every night, so I downloaded the latest backup and started restoring the deleted files. I also temporarily disabled all integration RSS feeds because without the missing files they couldn't be rendered correctly. Since I didn't know which files exactly have been deleted, I decided to restore all files from the backup. It took about 4 hours, so by 5:30 PM all files, except the ones created after the latest backup has been made, have been restored. At this point, I also re-activated previously disabled RSS feeds.

After checking which files are still missing it turned out that they're all email messages. So I started restoring them semi-manually from Mailgun, which I use for sending and receving emails. By 9 AM, Saturday (April 13) I was able to restore them all.

What I did to prevent such data losses in the future:

  1. Change the server config, so it's harder to delete files accidentally.
  2. Optimized the restore process, so if I have to restore files in the future, it takes less time.

I'm sorry for the inconvenience! Let me know if you have got any questions.

Published on April 15, 2019

February 2018 Updates

This month Notifier turned 6 months old 🎉 Thanks for using and supporting it! Here are some nice features and improvements that I added in February.

Focus on RSS Integrations

Since the majority of the customers use only RSS integrations I decided to focus more on them. So I'm planning to add more content sources for RSS integrations and to improve the current integrations. Let me know which content sources you'd like to have.

On the other side, I removed the ability to add new non-RSS integrations (e.g. sending notifications to email, webhooks, or Slack). The existing ones will be supported until 1st of May. After that they'll be shut down. If you'd like to continue using them I'd suggest switching to Zapier, which supports a lot of different integrations. Drop me a line if you need help transferring your integrations there.

Fast Content Delivery to Your RSS Readers

I added WebSub protocol (former PubSubHubBub) support to RSS feeds. If your RSS reader supports that protocol (e.g. Feedly, Feedbin) new RSS items would appear in the reader immediately.

I also reduced delay in how fast Telegram messages appear in your RSS feeds after they have been posted to a Telegram channel.

RSS Feeds Improvements

Telegram messages in RSS feeds are linked now to their original pages on t.me. So if you'd like to open a Telegram message in your browser or share its URL just click on its title in your RSS reader.

Email messages in RSS feeds have now its sender set. Most RSS readers display it beneath the title. Here is an example from Feedly:

Example of email author in Feedly

Follow me on Twitter or join my Telegram channel where I post new feature announcements as soon as they're released.

Published on February 28, 2018

Paid Plan, Telegram Integrations, and Other Updates

I launched the paid plan for 4 €/month. It allows you to get up to 20,000 notifications per month and add Telegram integrations. More details on the pricing page.

The free plan will remain as well. It allows you to get up to 100 notifications per month. Unfortunately, due to Telegram limitations, I can't support Telegram integration for free anymore. In one week (on January 25) the existing Telegram integrations will be deactivated for accounts without the paid plan.

I also created a page with personal integrations list. In case you don't see some of your integrations on that page you could add it here. For RSS integrations you could click on the RSS feed heading in your RSS reader or open URL from the RSS feed's <link>.

Published on January 11, 2018
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