Entries Tagged 'Craig's Little Buddy' ↓
May 22nd, 2008 — Craig's Little Buddy
I’ve been super busy with Blip.fm stuff lately so I haven’t had a chance to blog at all. I’ll write about Blip.fm soon enough but for now Craig’s Little Buddy gets a bit ‘o lovin’.
Last week Little Buddy got 2 (I think related) writeups in the blogsphere which was a total surprise to me. The 2 writeups are on:
I found out about these through my referrer reports in Google Analytics. It’s pretty cool. All in all it really doesn’t mean anything at all but it’s nice to see my no-pr, side project getting a bit of notice. It’s actually got a little CrunchBase profile as well. I dunno how it got there but it’s pretty cool.
Blip.fm also got written up in Killer Startups this/last week. So, I’ve got 2 Killer Startups. LOL. Now I gotta go for a hat trick.
May 5th, 2008 — Craig's Little Buddy, Google, Life, Yahoo!
I was just checking the weekend Search Engine stats for Craig’s Little Buddy and saw that I got more hits from Yahoo! than Google.
My site doesn’t get a ton of traffic or anything so this isn’t some amazing metric but I gotta say I’m pretty shocked. The queries from Yahoo! actually seem better as well. Here, check ‘em out:
Yahoo! Searches
- custom sz520 for sale craigslist
- 1963 buick 401 carb replacement for rochester
- 1977 aeroglass trihull boats
- 90k mile tuneup for nissan pathfinder
- aquasport boats for sale
- craig’s little buddy
- craigs list waverunner houston
- craigs list zodiac yamaha
- craigslist denver co\used 1989 toyota corolla le\for sale by owner
- craigslist little buddy
- craigslist pontoon boats
- craigslittlebuddy
- ecs 945gzfm
- ernie ball music man silhouette guitar peizo
- extend-a-truck™ hitch denver
- menzari wheels sacramento
- vw cabrio for sale in lake charles, louisiana
Googel Searches
- craigslittlebuddy
- search all of craigslist little buddy
- craigs little buddy
- http://www.craigslittlebuddy.com
- craig’s little buddy
- craigs search buddy
Kinda crazy huh?
It looks like everyone coming in through Google is just too lazy to type in the browser’s address bar and is performing a search instead. Its pretty hard for me to even consider those “searches”. On the other hand the Yahoo! queries are the actual queries I want.
I’m no SEO pro but when doing titles, H1’s, URL’s etc the Yahoo! queries are pretty much what I was shooting for. Some of the queries rank well on Yahoo! & some don’t. I’ll look into the ranking voodoo and try to make that stuff better but I am encouraged that I’m getting hits for these queries.
Pretty interesting stuffs 
May 2nd, 2008 — Craig's Little Buddy
In my last post I mentioned that people from the BC Rich Players Forum were visiting Craig’s Little Buddy to find used BC Rich guitars. I actually signed up check out there forum and saw that someone had links to a BC Rich Stealth for sale in New Jersey.
That’s awesome… except it outlined a shortcoming in Craig’s Little Buddy.
The “browse” links determine which for sale item to show based on an index variable in the URL (i=xxx). Also, if you’ve never used my craigslist search before it will default to searching the 22 main craigslist cities.
Now… this brought up 2 shortcomings.
- The index thing was stupid. The browse pages should operate on permalinks not ever-changing index values.
- People may publish a browse link to an ad which sits on a non-default craigslist location (New Jersey in this case)
So I fixed this tonight…
- The browse links now operate off permalinks (p=http://xxxxxxx).
- Since the browse links contain the permalink… if the particular ad is not in a default city list I add that location to the searchable set as if the user had customized which cities they wanna search.
This works way better. The index thing was just a brain fart. The index will always change… if a new ad shows up the indexes are all different… that was just stupid on my part. Plus, expanding the searchable city list on the fly is pretty good stuff. The odds of the browse link being valid are way higher now. The only way it’ll be invalid is if it’s not found via Craig’s Little Buddy at all.
This just strengthens my previous rant on the analytics thing. Seeing the context of your inbound links helps you follow the same flow random Joe’s gonna follow when visiting your site. In certain instances (like this) bugs, areas of improvement/clarification & the need for better error text/detection are revealed.
April 29th, 2008 — Craig's Little Buddy
Search results now have thumbnails
So try a search for something like Corvettes for sale and scroll around a bit. You should see the thumbnails in the listings.
But… there’s a catch. Yup, there’s always a catch. I only get thumbnail info if the ad’s owner actually used HTML to embed the image (using the <img> tag). If the ad’s creator uploaded the images into craigslist then I have no idea if there’s any images or not 
I’m considering making certain sections always do an “image only” search. ‘Cause really, who wants to see ads for vintage fenders if there’s no pictures?
April 28th, 2008 — Craig's Little Buddy
Tonight I found out that craigslist’s RSS URL changed which in turn broke Craig’s Little Buddy.
The RSS URL used to follow this format:
const RSS_URL_FORMAT =
'http://%s.craigslist.org/search/%s?query=%s&srchType=%s&minAsk=%s&maxAsk=%s&hasPic=%s&format=rss';
Well, it still does… but only if you actually have a search query. It used to be that if you had an empty query all you had to do was set query=*. Setting it to ” didn’t work. They actually didn’t even have an RSS link on empty query pages. So the * was the secret.
But now they up and changed the empty query RSS URL on us. It now looks like this:
const RSS_URL_FORMAT_EMPTY_QUERY = 'http://%s.craigslist.org/%s/index.rss';
So, there’s 2 formats now…. good times. Anyways… bug fixed and the “index” pages, like the electronics for sale page, are all populated again.
I really gotta fix the descriptions and titles for all the pages though. It’s pretty annoying since the barter, wtb, free, all & general don’t fall into the same format as the for sale pages.
April 25th, 2008 — Craig's Little Buddy
One of the members of the Dean Guitars Forum linked over to Craig’s Little Buddy to share some listings for Dean Guitars for sale. The thing is he linked over the “browse URL’s” which surfaced a bug (aka something I completely forgot to take care of).
So a “browse URL” is the page where I frame in the CL ad while maintaining pagination and other search functionality in the top frame. Here’s an example of a “browser URL”.
I never intended these URL’s to be distributed. I have these URL’s blocked in my robots.txt and completely forgot to deal with the “someone copy/pasted the URL” issue. Pretty much a brain fart. The thing is these URL’s may or may not exist depending on what cities the visitor has chosen to search and the state of Craigslist… sometimes there just isn’t a 78th result for Toyota prius for sale. You’ll notice an index in the URL… that’s how I know which ad to show. I could use the CL permalink but, still, its not full proof and i’ll run into the same issue.
Anyways… long story short: I had my error_log on tail -f while I was watching TV and saw some issues poppin’ up. It was pretty cool actually. I really want the site to be a good tool for finding guitars so seeing people pop in from the Dean Guitars Forum is pretty validating.
It’s funny how differently you feel about bugs when its a pet project and not your job. If these forum folks popped onto a blank/broken page then I failed them not <insert employer’s name here>. It’s a different perspective. Anywho… I’m just stoked that there’s some referrals coming in.
On a pseduo-related note: I’ve seen Googlebot and Slurp pop through quite a bit lately so we’ll see how their indexes treat me soon enough.
April 22nd, 2008 — Craig's Little Buddy, Google, Internet
[user@server logs]$ grep Googlebot access_log | wc -l
41
[user@server logs]$ grep slurp access_log | wc -l
5
April 21st, 2008 — Craig's Little Buddy, Internet, Work
I just setup mod_expires for Craig’s Little Buddy. It’s pretty nice. Now images, js and css files are only re-requested one month after their mod time.
The quick little lines of magic are:
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/gif M2592000
ExpiresByType image/jpeg M2592000
ExpiresByType image/png M2592000
ExpiresByType text/js M2592000
ExpiresByType text/css M2592000
Good times.
April 20th, 2008 — Craig's Little Buddy
Analytics is starting to report some numbers for my little craigslist search companion. Here’s a peek:
First off, due to TOS reasons, this isn’t a $ making project. My goal always has been to help guitar collectors find stuff on craigslist. With that in mind I’m pretty happy with the current pages/visit and time on site numbers. The bounce rate’s nice and low too.
So, initial indications are that the ~90 visitors/day are searching for a few things and hanging out for a little while. I’d like to get the pages/visit higher though. I had one session where a user searched for “charvel” guitars and visited 170+ pages. I can’t remember how I got to that stat but here’s another chart…
So 60+ folks visited 20+ pages. Not bad…
I’m considering this whole project a lesson in usability. People like it and I’m trying to learn & measure whatever I can in order to increase value for users while educating myself on user experience.
If you’ve got feedback lemme know yo.
April 19th, 2008 — Craig's Little Buddy
Just made a couple changes on Craig’s Little Buddy.
- Based on a comment from Mike I added a new link in the H2 section labeled “search more cities” which I hope will clarify how to pick the cities you wanna search. I’ll add some text parsing from the query soon but this was quicker.
- Google cruised by and my descriptions and titles looked lame in the results so I tweaked those up.
- fixed a bug in the “general” craigslist search. In a non-category specific search I display what category the result is from. For some categories (like household items) this didn’t work right and it would spit out Array. Anyways… i fixed that.
Up next is support for Canadian cities.
