Use your RSS feed to pounce on Craigslist deals

Craigslist can be a great tool for finding furniture, apartments, sports equipment, and more, but the first-come-first-served deals are fleeting.  Here's a quick tip—courtesy of Joe Brown of Wired—for scoring that coffee table or World Series tickets as soon as they're posted.

Every craigslist query is XML-enabled, which means it can power an RSS feed. And if you enter search parameters for, say, a beige 1982 Camaro for less than $500 (still a rip-off), the resulting Web address will be the same every time. Use this to your junk-hunting advantage by pasting the URL into your RSS reader, so any new post that meets your criteria will show up there instantly.

—Nick K. Mandle

Comments

[Kent]

I've used the CL RSS feeds but found that they don't always update instantly, at least not in Google Reader. YMMV, of course.

[Michelle]

Or, you can go to Yotify.com and create a "scout" for whatever you want, to have alerts emailed to you.

[kl]

This is great! I would like to apply this information to other sites too. Can you tell me how I can tell if something (a query? a web site?) is XML-enabled?