Find your obscure interests in your area on craigslist

Craigslist has been around for quite awhile, but it wasn’t until recently that I realized its power as a online classifieds bulletin board. I’m a member of a book club and we regularly get one or two new members every month from craigslist!

And doing a search on craigslist will get you results for any events or items related to your interests. For example, search “tournament” and you’ll get a several postings for different tournaments forming around Chicago (or you can search many other large cities in the world.)

You can even search for obscure interests in your area. Like interested in badminton in Chicago? Or how about origami in Chicago? You might find something at craigslist! Coming back to search on your topic every month can be tiresome. But it’s really nice that they offer RSS for your search, so you can be notified for when an obscure interest of yours pops up in your area. I have this on my watch list for Chicago:

• atari
• badminton
• board games
• book club
• croquet
• ddr
• duel masters
• lutheran
• monster trucks
• nerf
• origami
• paper airplanes
• rock paper scissors
• tournament
• transformers

How do you find your obscure interests on Craigslist?

1. Go to Craigslist.com and do a search for your interest.
2. If if there are no results, you will still need to do this: At the bottom of the results page will be an orange box that says “RSS.” Click on that.
3. On the new page that shows up, there will be lots of weird code and text. All you need is the URL. Copy the URL and put it into your RSS reader. Don’t have a RSS reader?…
4. If you don’t have an RSS reader, you can get one here: http://blogspace.com/rss/readers

Personally, I prefer Shrook.

These RSS readers are a program you can download to your computer and it will automatically check websites for you and see if there is an update. You can have many many websites being checked for you all in one place. And the program works much like email. In your RSS reader you’ll get a message with a subject line from a website that has been updated. You click on the subject line and part of the body will appear. If you want to read the entire body, just click on the link, and it will take you to your website.

It’s so handy. Why check 100 websites a day? You can plunk them into one reader and have the RSS reader check them all for you!