If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

I’m a big fan of Craigslist and I have a few friends who are addicted to it. From a business perspective it has done great things and has pushed innovation of the classifieds space. As a consumer you gotta love them.

As a developer it’s very easy to be frustrated with them. They offer no API which means developers do not get access to their vast array of data.

Also, I’ve been testing some of the Craiglist RSS feeds for a product and aggregator we’ve been developing (ex - I want to be notified when someone posts a dishwasher on craigslist). It hasn’t been working but guess what - the woes of an RSS hacker come back to haunt me - the feeds are invalid.

I finally put the pieces together thanks to Randy over at the RSS blog:

I got a report from a user today that Craigslist is also publishing invalid RSS. In this case, they are missing the colon in the timezone offset.

2007-06-17T10:29:18-0700

There’s definitely an up-tic in the amount of invalid RSS being produced.

C’mon now craigslist - it’s easy to run a SOAP call to verify your feed is valid before pushing it to the masses. Be developer friendly. Be consumer friendly.

Tags: RSS, Craigslist, Development

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Get GetANewBrowser delivered to your inbox