Get notifications for novel updates on Syosetu

Shousetsuka ni Narou is a Japanese-language website where authors publically upload their works. Many of the works originating from this website have later been published as physical books and then adapted into anime.

While the website has functionality for informing the user about novel updates, one has to log in and check their main user page to do so. There is no functionality for sending email notifications, or a webhook.

This project is a lightweight python app that can run in the background and periodically check for updates of specified novels, notifying the user about new chapters being added and modifications to existing chapters (if enabled).

The website's API is described here: https://dev.syosetu.com/man/api/

Requirements (tested version in parenthesis)

• Windows 10 - might work on 11 but untested
• winotify (1.1.0)
• PyYAML (6.0)
• python-dateutil (2.8.2)

Installation instructions

1. Have python and the dependencies listed above installed
2. Clone this repository into a location where you want to store this app.
3. Adjust the config.ini file:
   • FollowedNovels is the list of (comma-seperated) ncodes of novels you want to follow. These can be found by going to the home page of the novel you are interested in, and checking the url. It will look like https://ncode.syosetu.com/nXXXXYY/. The nXXXXYY is the ncode. The default config has example values for Overlord and Mitsuba Monogatari.
   • Examples of correct values: n4402bd,n0388ee or n4402bd or n4402bd,n0388ee,n0432fz
   • Set NovelModifiedNotifications to 1 if you want to be notified when an author made changes to a novel that are not new chapters (typo fixes, rewrites of previous chapters etc.)
   • Set SleepTime to a higher/lower value (in seconds) if you want a different update schedule. For updates more frequent than every 30 minutes, check the notes section below.
4. Run syosetu_notifier.pyw manually (every time you want it to be checking for updates, it will keep running in the background until you kill the process or shutdown your PC) or add it to autostart (described below).

Adding to autostart

1. Make a shortcut to syosetu_notifier.pyw
2. Move the shortcut to your startup directory (can be found by pressing Windows logo key + R, typing shell:startup and pressing enter)

Can later be removed from startup by going to Startup Apps in Windows and disabling syosetu_notifier.pyw there.

Features

• Windows 10 toast popups (thanks to the winotify package)
• Novel update popups have a button that takes you to the novel's homepage
• Customizable list of followed novels
• Option to notify about minor modifications to novels (information about which is not currently visible when going to the author's homepage in the web browser)

Notes:

• Syosetu has a request limit of 80k requests OR 400MB data transfer per day
• The limit is based on the IP address of the request origination, there is no user/password or token authentication in the API
• This app's default setting is to check the API once per hour. There is a second, hard-coded sanity check in history_manager that makes sure that 30+ minutes passed since the last request was sent. To make checks more often that value would need to be also adjusted.

Icons used in /res directory are modified version of icons downloaded from https://iconoir.com/ . The relevant copyright and permission notice is included in that directory.