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
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
CLUpdater is an RSS reader for craigslist, it supports all 200+ craigslist cities and 129+ categories. It also feature a picture preview window like list pic or radiux.
http://www.craigslistcompanion.com/
I use this browser:
http://www.CraigsPal.com
You can specify any combination of the cities, states, countries, you’re searching. All results will be available in single screen. Than you can even sort by price if it’s For Sale section. Every search is saved under user account, from that point, it will automatically search for the new results. No need to search Craigslist over and over again.
CraigsPal has “Browsing Craigslist with keyboard shortcuts” feature, to browse even faster through classifieds. It also has Craigslist preview screen, cell phone notification, email notification, spam flagging feature and many more.
CraigsPal is stand alone browser specifically made to save your time searching Craigslist.org