Every now and then I like to roam the netaverse in search of good deals on gadgets and photo gear. Moreso in the past, not so much in the present. But in the midst of these scouting expeditions, I often found myself thinking, "wouldn't it be cool if there was some way that I could get notified of items that I'm interested in that were just placed for sale?" Mainly for sites like craigslist, eBay and fredmiranda.com.
Well, recently I was reading the latest issue of Wired and in one of their "how to" articles they mentioned craig2mail which periodically emails you the results of a user-specified craigslist or eBay search. Which works via RSS feed. RSS feed... Hmm... The long dormant gerbil hibernating in my skull was rousted outta bed to get ye ol' rusty gears turning. Product search... RSS feed... interesting... Wait, what??? You can do that???
Lo and behold, you can do that. Basically just do a search in craigslist and eBay for whatever it is you want and look for the standard orange RSS graphic/link on the result page. In your fav RSS reader, subscribe to said link's URL and voila! You'll now be updated on every single item that matches your search. That's pretty much exactly what I was looking for. craig2mail takes it a step further and emails you with every new entry but I rarely need to know about something that badly. Keeping an eye on it in Google Reader is more than sufficient for me. Now if only fredmiranda would get with the times and RSS their forums I'd be a happy, happy man.
So anyway, that was my exciting web discovery for the week. I'd be more excited if I was actually looking for something but oh well, nice lil' tidbit to keep in mind for future reference.
