Poke button
Remember the good ol’ poke button from Facebook? It was a quirky (and often annoying) way to let someone know you were thinking about them, sometimes even sparking long-running poke battles. In a way, LinkedIn has a similar mechanic: just viewing someone’s profile sends them a subtle signal.
Recently, I read that Facebook has brought the feature back to life1 (they made it more visible, it was never actually removed). Apparently, it lead to a large spike in poking traffic.
I figured: why not add a poke button to my own site?
What it does
- You click poke
- I get a phone notification that says:
- “Someone from [city, country] poked you!”
- That’s it. No reply or anything (so no poke wars either).
How it works
- This site is built with Jekyll (static frontend).
- The poke button sends a POST request to a small backend built with Node-RED.
- Node-RED notifies me using Pushover.
- On the frontend:
- I use localStorage to prevent people from poking more than once per minute per browser.
- On the backend:
- I extract the IP address and look up a rough location (city-level);
- I allow up to 12 pokes per IP per 24 hours;
- Anything beyond that is blocked with a friendly error.
But why?
Mostly because it was a fun and small build. Also because I really like this kind of interactive and simple features.
You can poke me once a day. I won’t know it’s you, but I’ll know someone said hi. 👋
🎞️ Demo: https://youtube.com/shorts/H-h0LoeIOS0
Thumbnail: Justine Goode / NBC News; Facebook 2