DIY @mentions

A posse of Hypothesis users got together for delightful exploration that started with Playful Annotation in the Open and continued in the Hypothesis annotation layer for that blog post. (And then in an annotation layer on that annotation layer!)

One of the questions that came up was about @mentions:

Until @mentions are an in-app feature of Hypothesis, there’s a DIY solution. Here’s the URL of an RSS feed that finds occurrences of @tellio in annotations:

https://hypothes.is/stream.rss?text=@tellio

Here’s a picture of me reading that feed an RSS reader:

I’d rather receive such notifications in Slack, so here’s how I set up a private channel for my own @mentions in Hypothesis.

First, I created a private channel.

In the channel I typed:

/feed subscribe https://hypothes.is/stream.rss?text=@judell

Then, in an annotation on the Playful Annotation in the Open blog post, I @mentioned myself:

And after a few minutes (Slack’s RSS reader is pretty casual about updating feeds) here’s the notification in my private channel:

We can, and will, simplify all this. But it’s always nice to be reminded that small pieces loosely joined can work wonders.