craigsuck: A Craigslist RSS poller.
Copyright (c) 2010 Jake Brukhman. (jbrukh@gmail.com)
Periodically checks a Craigslist RSS feed for listings and pipes them to output. See the legacy craigslist-mailer tags (1.0.x) for e-mail functionality.
Installation
craigsuckdepends onBeautifulSoup. See this page for Mac instructions.
Motivation
Sometimes one desires to keep abreast of craigslist postings in real-time. One application is apartment listings in large cities, such as New York, where reading a listing early might confer a particular advantage on the apartment seeker. Real-time postings can also be filtered and the user notified of certain goings-on of interest -- such as Missed Connections posts that mention a "green scarf".
To aid in this process, craigsuck provides a commandline way of keeping track of incoming listings in perpetuity. It polls the craigslist RSS feed for a particular page and sends you the new additions every polling period.
Usage
Navigate to the Craigslist page you'd like to keep an eye on and copy the URL. Examples:
- http://newyork.craigslist.org/rnr/
- http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/apa/sby?query=&srchType=A&minAsk=&maxAsk=&bedrooms=&addTwo=purrr
Give a list of URLS to craigsuck, for instance:
./craigsuck "http://newyork.craigslist.org/brk/aap/"
To change the output format, you can specify it using the --format option. Format is given in Python templates style, with link, title, or date as possible parameters.
./craigsuck --format "${date} - ${title}" "http://newyork.craigslist.org/brk/aap/"
See --help for details.