How to enable (or block) push notifications from your browser preferences

Many browsers can deliver push notifications even when a website is closed. Learn how to choose which websites are allowed to send you push notifications.

Continue reading “How to enable (or block) push notifications from your browser preferences”

Pushpad SDK Change: one subscription per browser (instead of multiple subscriptions for each uid)

We have made a change to Pushpad in order to make its use more intuitive.

Now each device (browser) can have at most one uid (user ID) associated to it. Any new uid will replace the previous one.

To reflect this change we have also made changes to the Javascript SDK. In general, you don’t need to take any action because we have tried to make the change as compatible as possible.

However you can read the new SDK documentation.

The hidden cost of free push notifications services

Pushpad offers a free tier, but it’s not a free service. So why should you prefer a paid service to a free one?

More features? Better support? I don’t know, I leave that to you. The aim of this post is to underly that free services might have an hidden cost that you must consider before making a choice.

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Safari push notifications stop working after some time

These days we have investigated an issue related to Safari.

Sometimes it happens that you subscribe to the push notifications of a website, but after some time you don’t receive notifications anymore.

At first we thought that our system had a bug, but it’s not like that. Continue reading “Safari push notifications stop working after some time”

Send notifications in batch with the Push API

APNs an GCM have always provided a way to send notifications in batch.

It would be useful to see this feature for the Push API, which unfortunately doesn’t have it yet, meaning that you have to make an HTTP request for each endpoint. If you want to send a web push notification to N users at a time with a single API request you can still use a service like Pushpad which makes the hard work for you.

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Service worker: importScripts never updates scripts

Pushpad is a service for web push notifications. In order to add push notifications to their websites, our customers need to install the service worker that we provide on their websites.

Initially we just asked customers to copy and paste the whole content of the service worker. However this meant that for every update we made to the script, our customers had to take action.

Then we discovered importScripts Continue reading “Service worker: importScripts never updates scripts”

The Push API and its wild unsubscription mechanism

The working draft of the Push API currently doesn’t offer a good way to manage unsubscriptions.

The problems arise in the following scenarios:

  • The user blocks the notifications from the browser preferences
  • The endpoint is replaced because it has expired

Continue reading “The Push API and its wild unsubscription mechanism”

Add push notifications to WordPress in a few minutes

In this tutorial we’ll see how to add push notifications to your WordPress blog. Notifications are real push notifications, meaning that they are delivered even when the user is not on your website. This way you can re-engage users when you publish new contents.

We are going to use the official Pushpad plugin. Continue reading “Add push notifications to WordPress in a few minutes”