Automatically Monitor Craigslist’s For Sale Section To Find Good Deals
Here’s a nice craigslist tip I just discovered and wanted to share.
I’m building a basic home gym and am trying to get weights on the cheap. I’ve already got some equipment super cheap off craigslist, but need to get some more.
I found that every time I remembered to search for new deals, if a deal came up, it was already gone by the time I could contact the seller. I guess a lot of other people have the same idea as me.
I just found a somewhat hidden craigslist feature that makes my search much, much easier, and much more automated. I want to share it in case you find yourself wanting to monitor the “for sale” section on craigslist for a future deal.
You will need an RSS reader for this to work. I use the Mac OS X Mail program’s built in RSS feature, but a popular solution is to use Google Reader, since it integrates with your Google account.
Just go to your local city’s craigslist site and do a “for sale” search as you normally would. (I’m looking for Olympic weights, so I just search for “olympic”.) Scroll to the very bottom of the search results page, and on the bottom right, there’s a link that says “RSS”. That link is actually an RSS feed for your search term, meaning you can put it into an RSS reader and it’ll automatically fill in all the latest search results for your specified term.
The beauty of RSS is that it automatically updates itself when new content is available — meaning, in this case, when new results come up for your search on craigslist.
If the idea of RSS is confusing to you, then check out this website for a brief explanation. And once you know what RSS is, subscribe to my web site’s RSS feed.