Using KDE notification area within a shell script gives a lot of useful possibilities as you can easily display feedback from running services, other scripts, log analyzers.

I used a shell script that takes advantage of kdialog
application to create the above notification example.
#!/bin/sh message(){ cat << EOF Say <strong>hello</strong> using your <font color=red>nofication</font> area. Date: `date` Used space: `df -h | grep sda1 | awk '{ print $5 }'` Load average: <u>`uptime | awk '{ print $10 $11 $12 }' | sed s/\,/\ /g`</u> EOF } timeout=20 kdialog=$(which kdialog) ${kdialog} --passivepopup "`message`" ${timeout}