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Apollo + Craigslist: multi city keyword searches on craigslist data


UPDATE: 12/13/07
ApolloList has been renamed “Burrow” as of September of 2007. Please check out this page for more information: Search craigslist From Your Desktop Using Burrow (made with AIR)

Here is a small Apollo app I’ve been putting together using Flex Builder. I am calling it ApolloList but that is not permanent for obvious legal reasons. In its current state you can search the “jobs” section from craigslist.com by keyword and also change the target city using a ComboBox component. This is not the ultimate goal of the application however it is already pretty cool (and I think you can change cities more quickly than on CL too).

The next major step is to munge all of the data from multiple (10+) cities and render the aggregated results to the apps HTMLControl component. That is something I’ve wanted to do with craigslist for a long time. (I’m not aware of a current way to search multiple cities using the CL UI.)

Another item that needs to be resolved is the display for the job descriptions. I’m still brainstorming on how the next level of navitation will work and how the more detailed data will be displayed.

There are of course the craigslist.org Terms to deal with though which I need to read through a bit more before posting this app live. In the meantime you can check out the screen captures below. Depending on the feasibility of using the CL RSS feeds I would also like to create another ComboBox that could be used to change the section being searched from “jobs” to “for sale”. I will also probably need some whole other dialog where cities can be turned off and on using CheckBoxes.

Other ideas include the ability to save data and potentially compare it. That could probably be useful for “for sale” searches to find average prices on items per country/state/city etc. You may want to save a job too. The CL data could also be tied to other web services. That leads to a few ideas…

I also have the indeed.com job search API working in the app and adding all the other job search API’s available is a thought at this point. In the end craigslist might not be the best data source because there is no public API that I have seen but I still wanted to build this app if just to search multiple cities on CL for myself…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 4th, 2007 at 9:55 AM and is filed under ActionScript 3.0, Apollo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

7 Responses to “Apollo + Craigslist: multi city keyword searches on craigslist data”

  1. [...] http://seantheflashguy.com/blog/?p=8  [...]

  2. Any chance of getting a look at some code?

  3. Hi Michael,

    Yes, for sure.

    I emailed craigslist to see if developing this app out further would be acceptable per their Terms Of Use however did not receive a response. That being the case I kind of bailed on the project. I was just thinking about picking it back up though and changing out the craigslist RSS calls with some other usable job related RSS feeds. That kind of nukes my craigslist idea though at the same time. I wanted to use this app for searching everything on craigslist by multiple cities, like the “for sale” section etc.

    I am not sure on the legalities of releasing the source for this with the craigslist RSS feed addresses in the code. I might have to remove those before releasing the source (and that kinda kills the whole point).

    I’ll email craigslist again and see if I can get any kind of response. Even a “HELL NO” would be ok at this point just so I can either bury this project of keep moving on it.

    Thanks much for the interest. I am sure there is probably not a huge problem with me sharing the code with a few developers as a learning example so perhaps I can just send you the source. Let me try contacting the craigslist peeps again and see what’s up.

    Take care,

    Sean

  4. looks nice , You might be using the wrong email address , it might be getting sent to some outsourced noob who has no real pull and is just disregarding it.

    PS -I would love to see that code as well.

  5. I found a similar Free program for searching craigslist tool.

    I think it’s pretty cool. Basically the program give you the ability to search multiple cities across craigslist, plus it give you picture preveiws of each post on the search results.

    The program is called Craigslist Multi City Search or CLSearch in short from a new site called Craigslist Companion.

    You can visit their website at http://www.craigslistcompanion.com/

  6. I use http://www.CraigsPal.com , they have free and paid version. Nifty Craigslist reader

    It is totally new experience with Craigslist.com

  7. CraigZoom is by far my favorite way to search Craigslist. http://craigzoom.com

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