OMFG I Wrote a Book!
Design for Hackers: Reverse-Engineering Beauty (Wiley & Sons, September 2011) will help you see like a designer does.
Sign up for updates now »One of the Eight Life Hacks for Health, Wealth, and Happiness is to Buy Used. But, sometimes this can be tough. Really hot items can go fast off of Craigslist, and then there’s the rarer items – how are you to know when they show up? It can be tempting to just go to the store and buy that food processor you need; but what about all of those food processors out there that need new homes? Here’s a video showing you how I get a text message notification when new items I want show up on Craigslist:
Here’s the summary:
- Search on Craigslist for the item you want, and do the appropriate neighborhood filtering.
- Click on the “RSS” icon at the bottom of the search results.
- Copy and paste the URL for the RSS feed into Pingie.com (if you’re on Safari, you’ll have to change the “feed://” at the beginning of the URL to “http://”) Of course, you’ll have to enter your phone number, carrier, and e-mail address as well.
- Next time an item shows up with your search criteria, you’ll get a text message or e-mail notification, and hopefully – just what you were looking for!
I love buying items off of Craigslist because 1) it’s cheaper, 2) it’s good for the environment, 3) you can find more interesting stuff, and 4) I even make friends in the process!
Check out the rest of the Eight Life Hacks for Health Wealth and Happiness
rishi said,
March 31, 2009 @ 5:51 am
great post! I just set one up for a ping pong table
Seth said,
January 8, 2010 @ 2:00 pm
Unfortunately, Pingie has suspended operations as of Nov 8th, 2009. Is anyone aware of a good alternative?
mike said,
January 15, 2010 @ 12:07 pm
you can try alerts.yahoo.com rather than pingie, but i havent had much sucess with yahoo alerts.
Grigory said,
October 16, 2010 @ 12:49 am
I’ve built a tool that does exactly this as well. Users can monitor Craigslist, or any other classifieds site, or any RSS feeds in general. I myself use it to deals on air tickets, among other things.
Just copy and paste the URL you’d like to monitor – Craigslist search results, for example – into my web application – and you’ll receive SMS messages whenever new items are posted.
I’d love to know what you guys think! Feel free to message me at contact@gregspulse.com.
The app is called Greg’s Pulse. Here’s a link: http://gregspulse.com
cheers,
Grigory.
The Way I Work said,
April 25, 2011 @ 12:46 am
[...] I have an IKEA Jerker desk and Aeron chair because together, they can be adjusted to an ergonomic setup for me. My MacBook Pro sits on a laptop stand – again for ergonomics. I mouse with my left hand (more on that later), and use my Wacom Tablet with my right hand. When I’m at my home office, I hook up my laptop to a 20″ Dell Monitor. I bought the desk, chair, and monitor used on Craigslist, mostly using notifications. [...]