Notifications are Mahara's way of letting you know about lots of different events that may occur, and are related to you or your portfolio. You can receive notifications for all sorts of different reasons. It could be that one of your friends has created a new group on the site and wants you to join, or that a journal in a page you've been following has been updated.

To start with, you will receive notifications for actions that take place in all groups, forums, pages, and friend activities. This means you can receive a lot of notifications! If the site is busy, most users opt to use a daily digest.

Of course, you will see how journals and friends work on in Mahara later in this book, but for now let's get used to opening up the notifications page and seeing what's in there.