I am looking for a sailboat. Nothing fancy, just a safe, solid, little sailboat I can take the family out on for the weekend and learn the time honored tradition of capturing the wind. Through a few weeks of research, I identified and exact criteria of what I am looking for: Catalina 25′ under $10,000 with a trailer. Naturally my first choice for locating a sailboat brought me to Craigslist. What a nightmare, despite the fact that the site looks like a piece of poo aesthetically, there really is no way to search and locate this specific criteria easily across an entire state. You actually have to navigate to each location and then issue your search criteria…there are tons of locations in Florida…a daunting task to say the least.
Through some testing I was able to tweak the Craigslist query and figured out I can switch the location if I know it and re-use it.
http://daytona.craigslist.org/search/boa?query=sailboat&;catAbbreviation=boa&;minAsk=min&;maxAsk=10000&;hasPic=1&;format=rss
Now this little ditty will locate sailboats under $10,000 with a photo, insert a different city and I am good to go. Since I am not ruling out buying a trailer separately and I am not opposed to purchasing something besides a Catalina this produced the best results for what I was looking for.
The root problem still exists, namely that I have to manually do this EVERY day for EVERY location in Florida if I want to stay on top of what is for sale. These Catalina’s in this price range go fast, super fast so checking Craigslist twice a day would be a good thing (if not a bit obsessive, but hey it’s how I attack a problem).
Being a bit lazy (Lazy = Automation), I figured there had to be a way to automate this search across the entire state and then run a CRON job to check it twice daily (okay, I have it checking it every two hours but our server could care less, I assure you).
About this time, I noticed the little
graphic at the bottom of each successful sailboat search. NICE!!! Since I do a poor job of explaining what things are, this is the definition of RSS according to Wikipedia: “RSS (most commonly translated as “Really Simple Syndication”) is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works…” works for me. In human speak basically it’s a way to publish your frequently updated content (such as classifieds) so that people can see the most recent additions.
In short, problem solved…seriously. Each location in Florida has its own RSS feed that displays sailboats for sale. Now all I have to do is suck in these feeds to a database (MySQL) and I can pool my results in a format where I can search specifically as well as order the data to show me latest sailboat listings across the entire state of Florida!
My solution is a blog that updates every two hours:
http://www.ptdev.com/wordpress/
Although I still have not located my “perfect” little sailboat, I know I am seeing the entire State’s inventory for sailboats on Craigslist without lifting a finger (err…mouse click).
Since Craigslist is not the only site selling sailboats online, I then went to Sailboat Trader to find their RSS feed and to my dismay they do not offer one. I took the time to email the webmaster asking for its location just in case it’s something tucked away (and not used). They had no clue what I was talking about, but were very interested once I showed them what I was doing with Craiglist. I tried a few other Boats for Sale in Florida websites and all had the same reaction.
In short, I don’t think anyone has realized the convenience and power of RSS when serving their content to the masses. I predict a trend (if us web folks grab onto this) that sites offering products for sale will treat their content as a dynamic feed and thus open their content to new methods of getting it to the masses. Take my PT Dev site, this is nothing more than a filter I can point to every location on the net I can find. Since I point the user (me) back to Craigslist it behooves Craigslist when similar minded people access my site looking for similar items.
I have been experimenting with Blogs for clients for quite sometime and am amazed at how quickly Google treats these feeds and inserts them into their search results (In some cases, a matter of hours). Recently a manufacturing client placed their technical documents online in a blog style RSS feed and by the end of the day had received a dozen calls for more information from interested parties. Google is now indexing their content and subsequently they are the top result for their product. Yummm! I love RSS at this point for sure!
Sailboat Trader said they will get back to me….I hope they do or it looks like I will be finding this boat on Craigslist.
Happy Sailing!!
Tony Nestor
CEO, Progress Technologies, Inc.
(239) 985-0335 ext. 623
tn@progresstechnologies.com
http://www.progresstechnologies.com
http://twitter.com/progresstech
Tony Nestor is CEO for Fort Myers, Florida based Progress Technologies, Inc. Progress Technologies, Inc. is a leader in the development of website and database applications for city government, real estate, financial and manufacturing companies nationwide since 1998. The company has continued to steadily grow while weathering the tech boom and crash of the late 1990’s and today’s market by providing unmatched customer service and top of the line programming techniques.