New project: SEA — Seasons, and Notification Triggers

I’d been thinking about how I want to live more intentionally with the seasons, and naturally end up reaching for a mini-site to address some small need I have. SEA — Seasons is a little site dedicated to seasonal living; it’s optimized for the Seattle area, but many of the ideas may be relevant elsewhere in the Northern hemisphere.

With recent dire climate change news, I’m actually more thankful than ever that I’ve been compiling some of these ideas. I want to cherish our natural world we have while we have it, and I agree with those who say there’s nothing like love to inspire you to fight hard and protect something.

There are individual pages for each of the eight segments of the year. These mark the beginning of the season (named after traditional pagan observances), and provide ideas for activities, local events, and produce that is timely for that season.

Each of the seasonal pages has its own color:

When working out the layout of these pages, it annoyed me at first that some things weren’t in balance. But now I’ve come to love how some of the pages are lopsided: it just further illustrates how some seasons are periods of bounty, and others of hibernation.

Notification Triggers

I like to play around with something new on my side projects. On this one I tried out the experimental Notification Triggers API, which I first caught wind of via “Creating Scheduled Push Notifications”. To demo this, you’d have to enable the #enable-experimental-web-platform-features flag in a Chromium-based browser, but Notification Triggers basically enable you to schedule notifications client-side based on a location- or time-based trigger.

When a user invokes the “notify me of new seasons” button on the site, that will pop a notification request prompt. Accepting the prompt will then schedule notifications for the start of each season, one week in advance and day-of—but only if those dates are still in the future. You can check out the notifications logic here.

Each new year will bring new dates along with it, which can shift a bit year-to-year. I’m not exactly sure how I want to handle scheduling notifications for those new dates, so will have to do a little more thinking there!

Check it out

Find some ideas for seasonal living at SEA — Seasons, or you can explore the code on Github.