Being in a niche fashion, it can be tricky to be able to track everything down and know all of the new releases for the most obscure brands. Some have newsletters, some have social media accounts, but all of the Japanese websites seem to have a thing in common: a news section on their website. Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to be notified when these get updated, in a single place of your choice? This is what we’ll be attempting today with PageProbe, a browser extension that can track any page you want and notify you of changes. We will also see how to set up the notifications so they go to your discord and a telegram chat of your choice.
Setting up tracking with PageProbe
After installing PageProbe in a browser of your choice between firefox, chrome, or edge, you’ll be able to find it in the extensions tab of your browser.
Using it can be as simple as going to a page you wish to track, and right-click on the element that interests you, then pick “Track content” to open a PageProbe tab and define what you’d like it to do for you. For example here I went on Mary Magdalene’s page and decided to track this section of their news:
A yellow highlited rectangle on the page should give you a hint if you have selected the right thing. Also the contents should appear next to “Current Content”. (not sure why it’s empty in my screenshot but it did work for me.) Here you may set the name of your tracker (this will also appear at the beginning of your discord and telegram notification messages); how often it should be checked; if you want to only send a message for the first element or the whole thing, (in MM case it’ the whole thing or nothing lol, but on other websites this is useful) and you probably want a message only on the condition that something has changed. Then in the last part, you can set what action PageProbe should perform once it detects a change, and as you can see, I set it as follows:
It should be noted that PageProbe will only work while your browser is open, so you may want to set it on a computer that is constantly on for the best results. Also, it cannot post a link to the news or an image if there is any. Still, it can be great to at least know that there is an update without needing you to manually check it.
Now for the last part of the set up, let’s see how to get these magical links to get updates elsewhere!
Getting Discord updates with a webhook
To receive updates on Discord you will need to have admin privileges that allow you to create and manage webhooks. The process beyond this is ridiculously simple. Just click on the clog next to the channel where you want your updates to be posted:
Then in the settings, if you have admin privileges you should see the tab Integrations, and Webhooks in it:
Click on “New Webhook” then copy the webhook URL using the button under it. Paste that URL in Page Probe and you’re done! You can also give your webhook a cute name and avatar.
As an extra touch of fanciness for your non-Japanese speaking users, you may also add a Translator bot and give it the command /channellanguage add channel:#lolita-news language:english to have it automatically translate to English any Japanese message it detects in that channel. (replace the channel name with your own channel name). The result on discord may look like this:
Telegram bot updates
Create the bot
You can create a new bot speaking to BotFather on Telegram. Don’t worry, the process is super simple! choose /newbot then give it a name, and a unique handle. That’s it, your bot has been created!
Chat with the bot
Next, let’s add the bot to the chat where it shall provide updates. BotFather will tell you the link to start chatting with said bot, so start a new chat to get to know your bot. You may also add it to a new group if you wish to create it for more people to receive notifications at the same time. Then write a message to your bot in the chat you want it to write from.
Find the bot token
To have the bot send a message in that chat we will need two things: a Token and a Chat ID.
The TOKEN can be found in the “Your token is here” area of my screenshot above and it is the secret token that botfather has sent you in the last message under:
Use this token to access the HTTP API:
Use the token to find the chat ID
But we also need to know the chat id otherwise the bot won’t know where to write! We can get that with this other link:https://api.telegram.org/botTOKEN/getUpdates
After replacing TOKEN with your secret token, paste that url into your browser, it should spit back some code to you in form of a Json, simply look for “chat” and the id right under it, it should have a bunch of numbers (or a – and then numbers if it’s a group chat) and that’s what you have to copy."chat": {
"id": HERE IS YOUR ID
If you don’t see a chat field there, perhaps you forgot to send a message to your bot, so make sure to do it, then refresh.
Get the bot to say hello to you in the right chat
To have the bot send a message in that chat, all that’s needed is to click on a link structured like this:https://api.telegram.org/botTOKEN/sendMessage?chat_id=CHATID&text=hello
In your browser, paste this link in the address bar and replace CHATID as well as TOKEN with the two we have found earlier. Then hit enter to visit the link, which will trigger the bot to send a message. If the bot sends you a hello message in the right chat, then all is ready for the next step!
Paste this link in PageProbe
All that’s left is to paste the link you used to send the hello inside the PageProbe tracker, in the Action section, choose “Send Telegram Message via Bot” then paste the link without the hello part, so it’s formatted like this:https://api.telegram.org/botTOKEN/sendMessage?chat_id=CHATID
Remember to replace the Token with your secret token and keep the bot in front, and the chat ID with the one you got earlier. And done!
List of websites to track
Since this process can take a bit of time, I have set a list of the most common lolita websites you may want to track, which you can download here (right click and save as). Please use Find and replace in a text editor to replace the XXXXX with your Discord webhook and YYYYY with your Telegram bot link before importing them.
To import this json go on the PageProbe extension tab, click on the clog, then on the blue “Import Data” button and select this file after you ave modified it. Feel free to adjust it and suggest changes or additions!
I hope you’ll enjoy this and find plenty of things to track 😀 I would love to receive creative suggestions. Personally, I also use it to track when new train rides get updated on the very elusive Italian website for historical trains we have here. But it can also be used on Mercari to check for price updates, on any page to see when a product is back to available, etc. and in the actions you can set it to check super frequently and have a tab open for you the minute it does change giving a rapid advantage in getting tickets for example. Have fun!
