CraigsWatcher (v.96 as of August 10, 2012)
I'm forever searching Craigslist for Cushmans and thought it'd be handy to be notified whenever something new showed up. I couldn't find anything that did it, and thus CraigsWatcher was born. Type a search term and it does the searching for you, and sends an email whenever it finds something.
I should note that the program isn't quite finished. It does what I need it to do really well as evidenced by all my semi derelict Cushmi, but there's things it could do better, like search for more complicated search terms and search for lots of things at once. And since the email server is hard coded to use Gizmoware.net, some ISPs won't let it send you the notification emails. If you need it to do something that it currently has trouble with, email me and I'll see if I can muster some inspiration to fix it for you.
Quickstart
- put in a search term, select your category and city, then click "add to watch list". If you choose "multiple cities" for the city, don't add too many, like 4 or so at the most.
- if you want email notifications, go to Preferences and check "email yourself notifications". You'll also need to tell it where to email those notifications in Preferences --> Configure Email.
- personally I like to minimize the program to the System Tray (by the clock) so I don't need to look at it, and I also like it to start automagically with Windows, all of which are set under Preferences.
Screenshots and Notes
In this screenshot you can see what it looks like when its searching for "cushman" in Craigslist San Francisco. Note that it can just as easily search in multiple cities by choosing "Multiple Cities" from the city pulldown menu.
As you can see it found 4 postings for "cushman" in the San Francisco "All for Sale / Wanted" category and emailed me a status report, which has links to each ad and any pictures from the ads attached.
In this screenshot you can see the preferences. Most of them are pretty self explanatory, but note that you need to click "set email addresses" to tell it where to email the ads. I repeat: you need to click "set email addresses" before it'll be able to email you anything.
One thing that's probably not obvious: to search multiple cities, choose "multiple cities" from the Cities pulldown list and it'll open a Window that lets you check multiple cities. If your city isn't listed, let me know and I'll add it.
It also has a feature where it'll automagically email the poster of the ad saying re: whatever their subject line was, "Hi! That sounds like just what I'm looking for. Is it still available?" This pretty much guarantees you're the all-important first responder, but I thought it was against the spirit of Craigslist so I disabled it.
Updates:
-9/1/2010: fixed it.
- 4/20/2010: Added the "free" category, and updated it for some changes that the Craigslist folks made to their search results structure.- 9/17/2009: v.80 made some changes to the way it sends emails (changed the SMTP port to 587) so Craigswatcher should be able tos end notification emails even when using tight-assed ISPs that block certain ports.
- 7/25/2009: v.77 fixed the broken installer, all should work now, oops.
- 7/16/2009: Added Grand Rapids, MI to the cities list.
- 12/21/2008: Added the option to start automatically with Windows.
- 12/12/2008: The emailing should really, truly work now. Including sending pictures.
- 12/11/2008: fixed the emailing. So it'll now email you with new postings. Also added a few more cities, and fixed searching cities other than San Francisco.
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