a drop of water

To start off, you will need to RSS feed reader (I use reader.google.com – which I will refer to in the following examples).  If you haven’t used reader.google.com, simply visit the site and set up an account if you do not have one already (i.e. gmail account).  Next, go to craigslist and do a search for the desired item.  Example: searching for nintendo wii (link: http://sandiego.craigslist.org/search/sss?query=nintendo%20wii)

At the bottom of the page you will notice an orange RSS button.  Clicking that link will send you here (link: http://sandiego.craigslist.org/search/sss?query=nintendo%20wii&format=rss) which should (at least it does for me) send you to a google page prompting you to add the RSS feed to your google homepage or your google reader.  Once added to your google reader, you are subscribed to this RSS feed and new posts on craigslist that match your search criteria will show up on your google reader page under the subscription.  Google reader will also allow you to subscribe to RSS feeds directly if you have a valid url.

I use google reader to track blogs (wordpress, blogspot, xanga, etc), ebay search rss feeds, craigslist rss feeds, and favorite sites like www.lifehacker.com).  RSS readers help you monitor the information overload that is the internet and in this posts specific focus, helps you manage searching for that exact item on craigslist (or ebay – the rss link is towards the bottom of the page on any search as well) that you’ve been looking for without having to revisit websites, type the same searches, and rescan all the old results.

Also a side tip, when searching on craigslist it is often helpful to narrow your search results by using “negative searching.”  If I wanted to search for a nintendo wii, but am only interested in new systems, I would type “nintendo wii -used” into the search box and only posted items with the words nintendo, wii and not the word used would be returned.

Here is a lifehacker post about the best RSS readers.

Here is craigslist page and the ebay page bout RSS.