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.


Demo

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