This may be a useful resource.
http://cyber.law.harvard.e
Best regards, ~Ray
Main Topics
Browse All TopicsI'd like to write an application that moniitors CL for for various items. I've experimented with pulling down listings, as shown in the code below, based on sample code I found posted. The code may or may not be the best way of doing this, as I've never used RSS before and a few things are unclear to me:
1. Exactly what comes down in an RSS? Only the TOP N listings? New listings, since the last time? It doesn't seem to retrieve a lot. Is it the typical CL page? How would I get "more"?
2. What's it mean by "subscribe"? Does the server track my subscription and try to PUSH, or does it simply mean the client application (my code) does all the work to PULL data?
3. Is there a way to pass searches to CL to alter the returned RSS, or do I pull everything down and then search through it?
I haven't found anything hel,pful on CL's site.
Thank you.
This Question has been solved and asker verified All Experts Exchange premium technology solutions are available to subscription members.
Experts Exchange has been collecting answers to technology questions since 1996…3 million and counting! If you have a question, chances are we already have your answer.
If you can't find the exact answer you're looking for, ask our exclusive community of 50,000 experts. You’ll get a personalized answer from a trusted professional.
Thousands of free tech tips, tricks, how-to’s and tutorials are available in our peer reviewed articles section. See for yourself how smart our experts are, no login required.
Access the answers to your technology questions today.
30-day free trial. Register in 60 seconds.
Members of the expert community talk about why the experience at Experts Exchange is different than what you will find anywhere else.

Try it out and discover for yourself.
30-day free trial. Register in 60 seconds.
Join the community of experts here and help other tech pros by answering question in your area of expertise. You can earn FREE access to all Experts Exchange's premium features and resources.
This may be a useful resource.
http://cyber.law.harvard.e
Best regards, ~Ray
Thanks for the help. It's hard to believe I've managed to remain RSS-ignorant for so long.
A few points I've noticed after a little research:
1. The link you provided actually describes a push protocol, so apparently, it is possible to truly "subscribe" to such a service, if the service implements it.
2. It seems that there are options for working with CL. When viewing the results of any search, the RSS link at the bottom is the ful URL that includes the search criteria, as well as the output format (RSS). Therefore, the feed inherently represents the search conditions. Additionally, I could leave off most of the criteria and then parse the listings myself, using my own search mechanism if I thought I could do a better job.
3. It's entirely up to my code to extract the last "published date" from the "feed" to determine the precense of new data. That's really what I meant by "getting new data", which is what you mentioned above with the "PubDate".
I hope to experiment some more to see if I can produce anything useful. I envision a tool that monitors CL for thing I'm interested in, eliminating the need to manually troll for things.
Business Accounts
Answer for Membership
by: Ray_PaseurPosted on 2009-10-16 at 07:56:27ID: 25590144
Answers...
1. What comes down is what the publisher of the RSS sends. If they send 3 <item> elements, you get 3, if they send 20, you get 20. There is no standard. The order of the <item> tags is up to the publisher. Logic would seem to indicate that the newest would come first, but this is not guaranteed. How to get more data? Call up Craig's List and ask for more data. The amount of data is really up to them - there is not a "get more" standard in XML or in the RSS subset.
2. Subscribe means that you put an RSS reader application on your computer. Every so often a timer in the application expires and the application goes out to the RSS XML file on the remote server. It checks the pubDate field in the RSS and if the remote pubDate is more recent than the locally stored pubDate, the RSS reader grabs a new copy of the RSS XML file. It is 100% pull, no push.
3. Searches of the RSS data are up to you. RSS publishers just put the data "out there" and RSS clients consume it any way they want.
Hope that helps some, ~Ray