Craigslist Search Utility (1 Viewer)

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I wrote a little search utility to make my life easier when I was searching for my 80, shopping for lenses, etc. on Craigslist. I posted this some time ago on the 80 tech page. I waited until I finally got the initiative to get a domain name and get it linked with my server to make the announcement here. And I added a third search field. Anyway, here is the link:

States

There is a writeup on the 80s tech page on how to use it here:
https://forum.ih8mud.com/80-series-tech/243020-craigslist-search.html

Basically, I got tired of searching "Denver" for "Land Cruiser" and then "Landcruiser" and then "LX450" and then going and doing the same miserable thing for "Boulder" and then "Ft Collins" and then, well you get the idea.

This app lets you say what you want to look for and dispatches the queries and writes them back in one response. You can limit it so you don't have to see 56 when there are only a couple new ones per day. It also condenses the output with smaller font and packs the links a little which I like.

It will also let you search other categories other than cars, just look at the pulldown.

If there are any errors like some city doesn't work or Craigs has added a city since I last updated, go ahead and PM me and I'll fix it. Craigs has also changed the category variables from time to time so I have to tweak it every 6 mos or so.

Paul
 
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I was writing the same thing in Java. You just saved me a whole bunch of time. Thanks a lot.
 
Thanks a BUNCH for this handy little app. Only thing is, it shows how much of a dumbass I am.......I would no more have any idea how to write a program that could do that than I would be able to quit thinking of ways to spend more money on my Land Cruiser!

Glad there are those of you out there who have created handy little devices like this thing called a computer!...............I don't know what I did before there was an Internet, but I'm certain I wasn't happy!
 
pmccumber said:
What would be easiest is to slap Canada on as another state and list all the cities in Canada. This is how Craigslist renders them but it will be a little cumbersome as there 20+. It will only take 10 minutes but I have to be at home. I'll have that up by the weekend, if not sooner.
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Well I was wrong on two fronts. One was the 10 minutes thing. Turns out the cities don't just differ in the URL by the city, they differ in the domain type (.org versus .ca). Wouldn't be that hard to kluge it but there are a couple better ways to do it and I'm going to try one of them here on my other system that isn't exposed to the world and make it work because it involves changing the database and 25-ish lines of code.

Also, there are indeed organized lists of cities by province so that would be the way to go when I do deploy it.

So Canadians are going to have to wait a little while. Sorry. -- Paul
 
pmccumber said:
So Canadians are going to have to wait a little while. Sorry. -- Paul
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Excellent tool. Look forward to when you get it to work for the Canadian cities.....
 
Excellente!
 
pmccumber said:
Well I was wrong on two fronts. One was the 10 minutes thing. Turns out the cities don't just differ in the URL by the city, they differ in the domain type (.org versus .ca). Wouldn't be that hard to kluge it but there are a couple better ways to do it and I'm going to try one of them here on my other system that isn't exposed to the world and make it work because it involves changing the database and 25-ish lines of code.

Also, there are indeed organized lists of cities by province so that would be the way to go when I do deploy it.

So Canadians are going to have to wait a little while. Sorry. -- Paul
Click to expand...

Again, thanks a million!
 
Better than sliced bread!

Thanks
 
This kicks ass. I'm such the CL junkie!
 
love it! Total time saver
 
Man, I too have been fighting this issue.
I have a love/hate thing for CL.
This is great.

THANKS!
 
In the new york cities, the cities after Rochester are screwed up. They are offset, for example if you select Rochester, it will search for Syracuse.

And thanks again!
 
Any chance you could make an option to search ALL states at once?

That would be great :)
 
Any chance you could make an option to search ALL states at once?

That would be great :)
 
The way my Craigslist searches work is you pair a city and a query string and issue the request and set the results aside. Then you get the next city and continue until you've done every city and query pair. I then do some paring down and changing of the fonts to make the results more viewable (in my opinion). Doing the whole US would be probably close to 500 cities. It isn't work per se in the sense that I won't be sweating, but, it would be just a lot of internet bandwidth and a lot of server bandwidth. Plus, I think it might piss off Craig. That is, I don't think Craig minds the kind of stuff I'm doing right now cuz it is just making their site a little more accessible. But the day I enable, with one or two clicks, 1000 queries on their server, I think that might get someone's attention.

That said, I've been thinking about putting together a database of all the current cruisers for sale on Craigslist. The users on this board or anyone else for that matter could see the last time a given state or city has been updated with current info and refresh it. That is, the results are there and you just refresh them and you'd be able to see the whole country on one page. Plus, the columns could be year, price, model, etc and it would be easy to sort. I hope that makes sense. But I think this would be a few hours of work and would be really cool.
 
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