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Wendy Boswell

Streamline Craigslist with RSS feeds

By , About.com GuideJuly 12, 2010

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craigslistCraigslist, one of the most popular community and classified ads site on the Web, is great for finding pretty much anything you can think of, from rental stables to a new job at your favorite beach town. If you find yourself constantly checking Craigslist for the same thing, say, a green couch or a set of Ford truck tires, then you've probably wondered how you can speed that process up. Simple: RSS feeds.

Here's how you would set up a Craigslist RSS feed. Navigate to what you've been looking for, for example, apartments in San Francisco. You probably don't want ALL the listings for ALL the apartments, so use the search field at the top to narrow your search:

craigslist

Once you have your search parameters set, scroll all the way to the bottom of the page. You'll see a link for RSS there.

craigslist

Click on that link, and you'll be asked which RSS reader you'd like to have the search results for your new search put into.

craigslist

Now, instead of checking Craigslist every day and having to put your search criteria in over and over, you've got a personalized search coming directly to you.

craigslist

Note: If you have a Droid or an iPhone, you can take advantage of the fantastically useful applications made to track Craigslist RSS feeds. For instance, on my Droid, I downloaded an application named CraigsNotifica that tracks as many Craigslist feeds as I can possibly program in there, any place in the world, and notifies me within minutes when a new post shows up - super useful.

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Comments
December 12, 2010 at 2:00 pm
(1) Bob Collins says:

I can’t get any feeds from Craigslist. When I try, I get the message “Safari could not update this feed because the source file is no longer available.” I get feeds from other sites just fine.

February 20, 2011 at 7:26 pm
(2) Joseph says:

Same for me, I get the “Internet Explorer Cannot Display this Feed”

happens on every place I am on craigslist, whether logged in or not.

March 10, 2011 at 1:56 am
(3) Megan says:

I can sign up for craigslist RSS feeds without a problem, but then the feeds don’t contain images, only text. Anyone know how to fix this?

March 22, 2012 at 8:07 pm
(4) Alex says:

You can use this Craigslist notifications plugin for Chrome. Much easier then RSS feeds.

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