I found this genious post by James Aaron over at Witigonen (via a Lifehacker post). It solved some problems I’ve been having with the limited Craigslist search features coupled with the crazy amount of duplicate posts that get dumped in your RSS feed if you’re monitoring multiple searches. I figured this was something I would just have to deal with until I read the article and learned about Yahoo Pipes.
This service takes in data or many kinds (in my case Craigslist RSS feeds) and lets you play with them how ever you like. In the end you get your very own RSS feed which is joined together/filtered/and cut up anyway you like. Now I’m not sure how much more useful this will be yet, but I’m pretty excited about using this tool for my upcoming housing search. Now instead of following 10 different RSS feeds with multiple duplicates, I can follow one Yahoo Pipes feed which aggregates all my RSS reeds, removes duplicates and sends me the results. Pretty cool if you ask me.
Check out my Craigslist 3 Bedroom Search Yahoo Pipe. It takes in 10 RSS feeds and picks out the unique ones based on the title of each post then shoots it out of its little blue pipe and into my Google Reader. A nice pretty picture of it below.
For a more detailed explanation check out the original post.
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