Get craigslist and eBay notifications on your desktop with Feed Notifier.
Looking to make a purchase online? Feed Notifier is a great way to stay on top of craigslist and eBay updates without refreshing web pages all day long. This tip will show you how.
Get craigslist notifications on your desktop.
Subscribing to updates on craigslist is easy, because craigslist makes their RSS feeds readily visible. First, browse to your local craigslist page.
Next, find what you’re looking for. Let’s say you’re in the market for a new bike. Here’s a listing for bike sales in New York City, for example.
Once you’ve found the category you’d like to keep an eye on, just click that orange RSS icon in the address bar.
To add the feed to Feed Notifier from here, just follow the appropriate instructions on adding feeds from Firefox or Internet Explorer, depending on which browser you use.
That’s all there is to it!
Craigslist feeds can generate a lot of traffic. However, the feeds are cached and only update every 5-10 minutes. So no need in setting a polling interval much faster than every few minutes. That’s still pretty quick for getting the latest updates with such little effort!
Get eBay notifications on your desktop.
eBay is a little tricker because they practically hide their RSS feeds. But the feeds do exist and it’s not too hard once you know where to look. But first thing’s first, let’s find what we’re looking for. Still looking for a bike? Just enter your search query or select a category from the list.
A huge list of bike auctions appear, but there’s no RSS icon in the address bar. They hid it!
Scroll all the way down to the very bottom of the page and you’ll see the RSS icon there. Click on it!
Now just follow the standard process for subscribing to the feed with Feed Notifier. (See the integration links in the craigslist section above if you need assistance.)
Feed Notifier is a great way to watch sites like these instead of a full-blown RSS reader because you don’t have to click through the items or make sure they all get marked as read, and you’ll see the updates as soon as they’re available. Just ignore the pop-ups if the headline doesn’t look interesting.
