Hot Tip For Craigslist and more. RSS

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cygnus

Feeling the Heat
Oct 23, 2010
376
Central, NJ
For many of us Craigslist is a great source of wood. Most of what I have has been from these listings. But make no mistake about, it can be competitive. I've arrived at several wood sites to find only the discarded crotches and narlies...or just piles of dust on the ground.

Here is my tip for being the first to receive those listings and ultimately the first one at the wood site. If speed is not your game this will still provide your Craigslist info to you faster than ever without having to enter your search criteria, or actually check Craigslist, again. Beyond that, this is a fantastic way to manage all your online information sources and review hundreds of articles in record time from a single screen. It's like having an inbox for each website so the news, info, articles come to you. It takes a few minutes a day for me to monitor 40+ sites (but just a bit longer to read what I want).

The answer: RSS

If you know what RSS is then you might as well stop reading. It's not magic. It's been around a loooong time but I'm constantly shocked at how few people adopt this simple tool. I figured I'd mention it to my friends here who may be spending to much time checking Craigslist and not enough time bucking!

I'll show you how this works with an example of how I've used it to find free firewood from Craigslist.

1) Run your search in Craigslist as usual.
2) At the bottom right corner of the results screen is a small, orange 'RSS' graphic. (pic #1) Right-Click on the graphic and choose to copy the link. Internet Explorer will give you the option to 'Copy Shortcut...' Using Firefox you choose 'Copy Link Location' (pic #2)
3) Paste that copied link into your RSS Reader (more about the reader in a minute)
4) I've done this for 4 different Craigslist searches covering 4 geographic areas that I might travel to for wood. My results look like pic #3.

I have it setup to refresh every 15 minutes so my wood listings are always up to date, I can quickly glance to find a new listing and I never have to click around in Craigslist again :)


As suggested in step #3, you will need an RSS Reader. There are many to chose from and they are free. I use Feedreader and have been happy with it. (I'll give it a 7 out of 10) I'm sure others can offer reviews for other readers. If you don't want to (or can't) download/install a small application then you can use Google Reader. This is also a good choice if you move from computer to computer and want to keep your feeds with you. The only downside is that you have to log in to your Google account for each session.

Again. this is not limited to Craigslist. Look around for the orange RSS icon on any site you visit and add those links as well. You'll be surprised how many sites provide this feature...look at the bottom of this post!!!!!!

This is one of my most powerful tools for mining news sites, message boards and more. Hope it helps you too.
 

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I appreciate this tip and I will need to do some exploring RSS myself. I've never used it.

What words do you use when searching craigslist?

I usually type in :

Firewood (free stuff)
fire wood (free stuff)
Logs (free stuff).


What other searches can you run to hone in on CL wood. I'll be honest. In 3 years - I've never yet scored a single CL find.

First off - they never respond to my emails. Even though I provide my phone #.

BTW - I responded to the maple in Baskin Ridge. We'll see if he gets back with me. Looks like it has been listed before in December. Might be tough to get to or maybe the owner is unreasonable and wants every limb and trunk to go with it and the ground raked and seeded. Maple is not in big demand around NNJ - but I'd take it .
 
I usually stick simply too 'firewood' in the free stuff section but I run it for North NJ, Central NJ and NJ Shore because it seems some people don't know where they really live.

I agree with the email responses. I usually jump right on the ones that give an address with 'wood at the curb.' I took 5 loads from a guy in Edison that way who posted 4 times in a week as he took down 3-4 huge Maples.
 
Thank you for this! I am finding it for all kinds of places like notification for updates on my son's teacher websites.
 
Thank you so much! I never knew what the deal was with RSS. I downloaded NetNewsWire for Mac and was up and running in minutes. Easiest thing I've ever done on the computer that I can recall. :)

Now if the feed for a Ford F-250 turns up a good deal, the feed for free firewood will help me fill it. ;-)
 
Thanks, I'd actually never noticed the RSS symbol on Craigslist.
 
Thanks a lot for sharing this. I've always ignored RSS stuff. Just setup a free feed on my iphone.
 
Def something I will look into as CL has produced a few cords for us last year.
 
I have only just learned what RSS means, thanks for this thread..........

But then we are a bit backward here in the old world ;-)
 
Firefox can store RSS links as some sort of live bookmarks also. My set I've used for years now is
"free wood" MD
free firewood MD
free "fire wood" MD
I also have one just looking for general free stuff, that I browse sometimes in case someone used a different word choice.
 
Nice! Thanks for posting this! I've been recently looking for an app of some kind for my Droid to notify me when something comes in CL. I'll look for an RSS reader now. Thanks again.
And for my area I find people post free wood in many different sections- sometimes in free stuff, sometimes general or materials so I just search the whole for sale section for both "fire wood" and firewood" and weed out the ones that are selling vs the ones that are free. I also search for "logs" as I've found good wood that way but the ads never used the terms firewood or fire wood. I sometimes find ads that are offering the wood for free but don't use the "free" word so I think its worth reading thru the listings.
I wonder if CL is ever going to ban selling or trading of tree products they way they did when they caved into the PETA dopes and banned advertising pets. Are the tree huggers going to pressure them next?:) Funny thing the site seems to have no problem with enabling prostitutes and the serial killers that love them !:(
Anyway thanks again! Great tip
 
WHile your at it RSS wood pile and gear from here it's nice to see all the new threads in google reader.... also if you have google crome it does a live update right on your tool bar
 
This has saved me so much time. Thanks for posting the thread. Great tool to use.
 
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