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:

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:

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.

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 78^th 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.

Just made a couple changes on Craig’s Little Buddy.

1. 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.
2. Google cruised by and my descriptions and titles looked lame in the results so I tweaked those up.
3. 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.