Making Craigslist easy!
I love hunting for bargains on Craigslist. My most recent purchase was a fabulous pottery barn sectional sofa. After swearing to never attempt slipcovers again I may try with the couch but we'll see...
Anyway, if you're like me you can start looking for something on Craigslist and then realize you've spent an hour and haven't looked up what you meant to in the first place. I usually narrow down my search by my exact city unless it's something I'm desperate for and then I will include the surrounding cities.
Oh but I found something that I love. There's a Firefox add on that lets you preview the pictures from the listings in the search results without having to click through to the actual listing! It's fabulous! You can cut a lot of time out this way. Here's a screenshot of me searching for a "wooden playset". You can see how it shows the pics on the actual search page and also when you roll over a pic with your mouse you see it bigger in a preview pane on the right.
Here's the Craigstoolbox download. You can download it for explorer or firefox.
Also, I don't know how many of you use a blog subscription service like bloglines or google reader but they are really cool so you should check them out. I use google reader because I never really liked bloglines. Anyway, you can turn any Craigslist search into a "subscription" and be notified whenever new listings are added.
Whenever you search just scroll to the bottom and there is an RSS feed button.
So whenever I check google reader it shows me all the new listings from the categories I'm interested in. So cool! I will have to write a separate post on subscription services as once you figure out how to use them they are so helpful!
You can subscribe to my blog by clicking the button up in the address bar.

