There are a few hard to find things in this crazy world. I’m looking for a way to get notified when things come up on craigslist in the northeast, maybe even the whole east coast.
Is there an e-mail notification that encompasses multiple craigslists? Search Tempest e-mail notification type thing?
I have often thought about writing a computer program to do just this…I’m way too lazy though
I am interested in this as well
i think i found a way
find the search terms you want to use, and run a craigslist search
then at the bottom right hand of the page, right click the RSS logo
then go to http://www.feedmyinbox.com/ and paste the RSS URL and put your email address in…you can just setup a whole bunch of those in interesting cities?
edit: looks like that’s only a once per day feed. You have to pay for real time…There are probably more free options for RSS to email feeds.
edit2: SearchTempest has an RSS option too. Top(ish) right on Search Tempest (after running a search), right click on “Feeds for this Search” Copy Link Location, paste into a rss->email webapp…profit
If you have a droid phone, there are some apps for that.
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craigslitnotifier?
dre is way too hipster to have a droid
don’t hate on my iphone brotato
I could write this… I love data scrapes 
I looked into it, since it isn’t hard at all
It’s against craigslist terms of service to use automated programs…good way to get yourself in trouble.
Emulate a web browser with a fake user agent and then and space out the requests.
For example, CURL the main page of say apartments: http://buffalo.craigslist.org/apa/
Parse the page line by line for the html code until the header matches yesterdays date: <h4 class=“ban”>Thu Aug 10</h4>
If you hit that element, stop reading the lines. If you haven’t, just stuff in 100,200,300 into the url until you wall all of todays postings. Once you collect your data, just break apart the DOM and look at each header for correct matches. If that is enough, its not hard to curl and follow that sub link to parse the post.
This will act like its a browser with a lot of free time and not a bot blasting their search query. Most sites limit processor intensive searches but not http GET as heavily.
well, I guess i thought the whole point of the program was to run it very frequently so you could be the first person to see a posting
but, I suppose that every 5 minutes isn’t really suspicous…parsing the output definitely shouldn’t be hard. I dont’ know though, if you keep the searches to a minimum you probably won’t get caught, but if they see requests from the same IP every few seconds or minutes over a long period of time, you will likely get caught. Those logs are easy to parse and find offenders.
if someone can stop by my shop and help me out with this I’ll give them $20
PM me your list of cities and what you want to flag and I will get you a quote =)
I just read the terms. As long as you don’t overburden craigslist’s systems or redistribute the RSS, you can use it as you want and since RSS is generated on the server side, they build the file you request and display it so they can load balance how often it updates (assuming CL has proper web devs) so you should be able to get 5-10 minute spreads