Any given visitor of my site presses a button, I get a notification. How do I do that?

I'm currently learning about web design, and I go through the lessons here on Treehouse I begin wondering what certain ideas of mine would like like in code.

One of those ideas is a simple button any reader of my site can press, and that I will receive a notification that that button was pressed. Say the button reads "I read this article the whole way through," the reader presses it, and then I, not the reader, receives a notification saying "Someone read the article the whole way through!" This is a lot like if someone who wasn't logged into Facebook liked your Facebook status and you get a notification for that.

Practical uses for such a thing aside, is this possible? My research tells me that there is a way to write in JavaScript and HTML something like "if this button is pressed, let's go to the default e-mail application and write out this specific message so the user can send it." But I don't want the user to send the message him/herself from an e-mail.

I imagine I need a 3rd party service, with which I can tell the site "If this button is pressed, send [code] to [3rd party service.]" And then the 3rd Party Service, receiving that message goes, "We got [code], now it's time to send the e-mail/notification he told us to."

I hope this makes sense. Maybe I'm really far off and there's a very different approach to doing something like this. I'm pretty new to this stuff, so please be patient with me.

Thank you in advance.