Craiglist Search Tool

Monday, July 28, 2008

I’ve made some more updates to the software and made a new permanent (non-blog) page for the tool here: https://zentastic.me/blog/zenclsh/. Thanks for the feedback so far.

Update: By request, Kijiji support has been added.

Other than that, Nefarious is totally swimming now, and can dive across half the pool, swim all over the deep end, and so on… There was another little kid at the pool yesterday that was scared of the water, but after seeing Nefarious swimming, and hearing that she taught herself, she jumped into the water and had her dad take her all over pool, and by the end of the evening she was trying to crawl into the deep end, shouting, “I’m brave, I’m brave!”

Hopefully what they say about swimming being an innate skill is true!

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Zentastic Craigslist Search Harvester (GUI)

Saturday, July 26, 2008

THIS TOOL HAS BEEN MOVED HERE:
https://zentastic.me/blog/zenclsh/

Alright… I’ve rewritten this tool with a proper GUI. As with the command line version, this lets you search Craigslist in bulk, across multiple cities for multiple terms, and over multiple days as well if you’d like, with new entries being tagged as such. Here’s the download link:

zenclsh.zip (39k)

Yes, it’s really only 39k. No additional libraries are needed either. No bloatware here! Just copy the executable and the two support files (the city list and the list of searches you want to do) into a directory and click the executable. Here’s a screen shot of it running and some basic instructions on how you use it (it’s pretty self-explanatory really):

And what that all means:

A. This is the name of the results file. It’s an HTML file that you can view in your browser. It defaults to “zenclsh.html” but you can call it whatever you want. It will auto-load when you begin, but it won’t auto-save.

B. Press this button to load the previous searches from the results file. You don’t have to do this unless you are using a different filename from the default.

C. Press this button to save your search results (with all new search finds tagged as “NEW”) and view them in the browser. This will also save your most recent cities and searches.

D. If you forget stuff, it’s got context-sensitive help.

E. This button starts a search, or, if a search is already running, kills it.

F. This is the list of cities to search. It’s a text box that you can edit. One city per line. Lines beginning with a ‘#’ are ignored. You can also edit this file in a text editor (“clcities.txt”).

G. This is the list of things to search for. Lines beginning in ‘#’ are ignored. You can either enter just a term, in which case all sections (ie. section “sss”) are searched, or you can enter a section followed by a comma, followed by the term (ie. “clt,victrola” for all victrolas in collectibles, or “car,mustang” for all Mustangs in cars and trucks, and so on).

H. Various information about what the program is doing (ie. a log) is outputted here.

I. This progress bar tells you how far through the current search task you are.

…and aw crap, after I made my graphic I realized I didn’t give that URL list a letter!!! It’s the results, which are updated live as the search is running. You can use it just to see what’s happening, and you can also double click on any entry and instantly view it in your browser, so you can peruse the search results before the search task is complete.

Consider this a “public alpha test”. Any feedback or feature requests are greatly appreciated. This version doesn’t have source code included but I will include it in the final version.

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Craigslist Commandline Search Tool

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

THIS TOOL HAS BEEN MOVED HERE:
https://zentastic.me/blog/zenclsh/

One of the tasks that I do in maintaining the kit car blog is searching Craigslist for interesting finds. Problem is, there’s no good way to search for multiple terms, let alone multiple cities — so in a single day, I’d have about 1,200 searches to do. So I wrote this quick little bot to do it for me.

harvestcl.zip (30k)

This contains a few files:

  • harvestcl.exe – This is the actual executable. You should run it from the command line, although you can just click on it as well, as long as the support files are in the directory you’re running it from.
  • clcities.txt – This is a list of all the cities to search. Blank lines are ignored, as are lines beginning with “#” (so you can comment out cities by putting a “#” in front of them rather than deleting the line). The file is currently seeded with all cities in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand.
  • clsearch.txt – This tells the program what searches you’d like to do. There should be one search per line, in the format “section,term”, where section is the short form name of the section as defined by Craigslist (ie. “sss” for all, “car” for cars and trucks, “clt” for collectibles, and so on), and the term is the search term. If the search term has a space in it, make sure you surround it by quotes. As with the cities file, you can comment out lines with the “#” character. The file currently contains the search that I do for the kit car site.
  • harvestcl.bas – For those that want it, this is the PB/CC 4 source code. Feel free to modify it or use parts of it for other projects — it includes some simple parsing code and http get code with support for 302 redirects (used here to redirect requests to country-specific Craigslist sites). This can be deleted.

When the program runs, it will search all the sites and create (and try and display) a file called harvestcl.html. Search matches will be listed by description (with a link) and split by the date they were posted. Every time you run it, new entries will be added to the same file, with the new ones being tagged with “NEW” so you don’t miss them. It maxes out at 15,000 matches, although you can change this in the code.

Hope this is useful for someone… If you’re looking for specialty items, it’s an effective tool that can be run daily to make sure you don’t miss something, no matter where in the world/country it is posted. Feel free to email me about this program at snowrail@gmail.com or post here if you have questions.

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Zap!

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

The last time I lived in an apartment building, I just had a view of the lake. On one hand that was really nice, but on the other hand, I’m really liking the view of the other buildings, especially at night. I like that there are hundreds of little living pods all around me, all suspended in the air, with different bits of life happening inside and on the balconies.

Right now there’s a big thunderstorm going on around us. I should figure out how to adjust my camera to take good lighting shots…

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Flaming Manta Mirage

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

I posted some pictures on Facebook* today of my old cars, and Caitlin reminded me of the story of when I took her for a drive in my old Manta Mirage right before I sold it (back in 2000 I think). The doors were opened by solenoids (so you pushed a button to pop the latch, and then pushed them up), but the one on the passenger side had a blown fuse and didn’t work. It had to be manually opened by reaching inside the door and pulling the cable that attached to the latch.

Anyway, we were just driving around the block. The car was running a little rich, and with straight headers coming off the engine and no real exhaust system, it blew flames out the back when you gunned it. At the stop sign just before my house, the entire rear section of the car became temporarily engulfed in fire — this was more than a little scary because there was a fuel tank sitting next to each occupant (right below the doors). I hopped out, but Caitlin was trapped inside the burning car, so I had to run around to her side, tear the interior panel off the inside of her door, and pop it open so she could escape. I didn’t have a fire extinguisher in the car, so I had to dash to the house and grab one, but luckily by the time I got back the fire was out and no damage had occurred… Definitely a story that could have turned out very differently!!!

* Since the new owner of BME chose to delete my “glider” account from the IAM community and redirect all old links to me to themselves and ban me from taking part in the conversations in ModBlog and so on, I ended up finally adding myself to Facebook to get my community-site fix, after having resisted it for ages. I have quite a few friend requests from names I don’t instantly recognize, so if you add me, could you please include a note about how we know each other (or even your old IAM name if I’ll recognize it better).

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