When they say Craigslist is simple, it really is remarkably simple. The company finally launched an official blog and it's every bit as functionally pared down as the rest of the site. Maybe even more so - there's no way to subscribe. What's a blog without subscription? A blog that gets read a lot less than it would be otherwise!
That's a real shame because there's already some very interesting looking content there. This is a solvable problem, though.
Michael Arrington, who saw the blog first, writes "The blog is lacking a RSS feed and has only rudimentary comments, but it is a true blog nonetheless." Why didn't they just through up a WordPress install? Nobody knows. While the bloggyness of it all seems debatable, we've got your RSS feeds right here.
Half for fun and half for work, we created an RSS feed for the new Craigslist blog that you can subscribe to below. That blog should be interesting, but if it ends up half as interesting as the Best of Craigslist section of the site - then look out Technorati 100.
Full feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/craigslistblog2
The body of the posts won't be delivered in this feed, as we struggled to scrape a feed at all using Feed43. When I say we, in this case, I mean my dashingly handsome and brilliant co-blogger Josh Catone.
Unfortunately, you can't take for granted that anything you build on top of Craigslist is going to survive, even if it solves a problem over there. The beautiful multi-city search tool Crgslst got shut down days after we wrote about it here. Luckily the wonderful Image preview extension for Firefox still works - check that one out.
The feed URL below will deliver the items on the Best of Craigslist page - warning lots of naughty words - very funny stuff. Even the Best of Craigslist's own native RSS feed is broken, so we scraped that too. Anybody who said you couldn't build a huge company online without giving RSS its due was obviously wrong.
Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/BestofCraigslist2
As was pointed out by one of our fantastic commenters, it turns out there is a full feed available for Best of Craigslist at
We hope you enjoy these feeds. Isn't RSS a wonderful thing? We sure think so here at RWW.
Comments
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WOW.
I'm so shocked that they aren't using a real CMS and instead rolled their own for the blog.
If you want to see a real WTF, check out how they are doing their permalinks to blog entries:
http://blog.craigslist.org/#languages
http://blog.craigslist.org/#dulcet
That's right, named anchors.
Which means that they can never support pagerization or they'll break all of the backlinks.
Holy 1996 Batman.
Posted by: engtech | April 3, 2008 10:50 AMThat blog has been online for a week. Once TechCrunch breaks a story, it becomes breaking news.
The main flaw with that blog is that it does not allow commenting on the blog itself; one has to be a registered users and be redirected to a Craigslist forum.
This takes away from the spontaneity and intimacy of any blog. Also, it takes away the ability to identify with the Editor.
But in time, they will probably tweak and optimize it. You can't get any worse than YouTube's or Google's official blogs.
Posted by: * Miss Universe | April 3, 2008 10:55 AMUmm... there's been an RSS feed for the Best Of page for years.
feed://www.craigslist.org/about/best/all/index.rss
Posted by: Seth | April 3, 2008 10:58 AMSeth, I see that one does work - wonder why that URL isn't in the header of the Best of Page? The one that's autodiscovered is a 404.
Posted by: Marshall KirkpatrickMarshall, not to be argumentative about it, but auto-discovery is working fine on my browsers and it is in the header:
Posted by: Seth | April 3, 2008 11:09 AMlink rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="index.rss" title="RSS feed for best of craigslist"
Seth, not to be argumentative on my end either (! ha !) but if you look at that header, it just ads /index.rss to the end of the URL, leaving http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/index.rss (a 404) for autodiscovery. The feed you pointed out, which works great by the way, has /all/index.rss in it! Conclusion: I am not an idiot! Ha, thanks for the right RSS URL, I've updated the post.
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrickyawn. It's 2008 and they don't produce a feed and their commenting is wacky. Sorry, no, come back later. There's a difference between pared down and missing basic features. This blog is the latter. And honestly? If they don't care enough to emit RSS/Atom why should I care enough to make an exception for them?
Posted by: rick gregory | April 3, 2008 11:13 AMMarshall, I never once suspected idiocy on your part. In fact, I've always admired your work. Love the site. I arrived at the /all link, btw, by hitting the "best-ofs" link at www.craigslist.org. Further inconsistencies on their site, perhaps?
Posted by: Seth | April 3, 2008 11:21 AM"When I say we, in this case, I mean my dashingly handsome and brilliant co-blogger Josh Catone."
Posted by: Neil | April 3, 2008 11:52 AMThe Rails_fu is strong with this Cat-one.
great find, thanks for the feed url!
Posted by: eric shannon | April 3, 2008 12:16 PMCraigslist uses a highly tweaked mod_perl setup to handle its traffic. Their team probably don't want to touch crap like wordpress or other free cms due to their production environment restrictions. They'd rather stick to what they know the best and roll their own blog software. I'm sure their own rss feed for the blog will come later.
Posted by: vicaya | April 3, 2008 1:21 PMIsn't this a job for RWW's favourite semantic scraper, Dapper?
Then again, the markup on the page is awful... are they taking simple a bit too far with the table layout and inline styling?
Posted by: Phil Nash | April 3, 2008 2:32 PM@Phil: We tried Dapper first, but it was struggling to parse the pages correctly (at least for the best of page -- I tried that one first, then just stuck with Feed43 for the blog).
Posted by: Josh Catone@phil: What are you talking, i love their table layout :)
Posted by: Dhingana | April 3, 2008 4:03 PMThe blog is not a Craigslist property, and Craigslist has sent them a polite C&D letter requesting they hand over the domain and walk away so nobody gets hurt.
Posted by: David | April 3, 2008 4:12 PMhttp://www.craigslistblog.org/2008/04/03/finally-craigslist-launches-a-blog-of-their-own/
David, that's a different blog you mention here - but yes, thanks for pointing out that part of the story too.
Posted by: Marshall KirkpatrickHey Marshall,
I was able to wrestle Feed43 enough to get the post bodies into the feed.
You can access it here: http://feed43.com/craigslist-blog-full.xml
Feedburner-ized: http://feeds.feedburner.com/craigslistblog-full
Alternatively, if you'd rather Josh update his feed:
Global search pattern: {%}©
Item search pattern: <h2>{%}</h2>{%}
Cheers
Posted by: Paul Irish | April 3, 2008 6:10 PMfinally a blog where that I don't have to subscribe to.
Posted by: VTFootballGrad | April 4, 2008 9:17 AMLooks like Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster is a bit peeved that somebody has a better blog than them. This is a very compelling story and will be closely watched. I don’t think CL has a leg to stand on.
Read the story…
Posted by: Rick Thomas | April 4, 2008 10:20 PMhttp://www.thelifeofluxury.com/goliath-craigslist-takes-on-david-the-blogger/