Tag Archives: rss

Craigslist blocking Feedly again

It looks like craigslist is once again blocking Feedly from accessing its RSS feeds. This happened a few months ago when Feedly traffic apparently got high enough to hit an automated block on craigslist’s end. They made some changes to reduce their traffic, and things started working again… until now. As far as I know there’s no official word from craigslist, but it seems likely that Feedly has simply grown to the point where they’re hitting the block again.

Unfortunately this means that at the moment RSS feeds from craigslist (like the ones from our RSS Feeds Tool) are not updating on Feedly. Most likely they will get this sorted out in the next few weeks, but if you don’t want to wait, there are a couple options. First off, other popular readers, such as NewsBlur and TheOldReader appear to be working for now, although as people move over from Feedly it likely won’t be long before they’re having the same problems.

A long-term solution, although with a bit more effort, would be to host your own RSS server. If you like NewsBlur, you can actually self-host it on your own server (or home computer), which will not only avoid getting caught up in these kinds of blocks, it will also save you the annual subscription fee. Code an installation instructions can be found on Github here.

Another popular option with a bit more detailed installation instructions is TinyTinyRSS. There’s a primer on MakeUseOf here. Whichever reader you choose, self-hosted or not, you should be able to import the OPML files generated by SearchTempest’s RSS Feeds Tool. Let us know how it goes in the comments!

Edit: It sounds like a number of people have been having trouble lately with self-hosted RSS as well. This thread at TheOldReader might shed some light. Apparently craigslist recently made a change to how they redirect RSS urls, which TheOldReader says isn’t supported by many other readers. So if your RSS reader isn’t picking up craigslist feeds, you might want to ask them to look into that.

Duplicate and distant results in RSS feeds

If you use craigslist RSS feeds (either directly or imported with one of our OPML files), you may have noticed an increase in duplicate results recently, as well as results that are outside your specified search area.

This is second-hand info, but it appears the problem is that craigslist has recently started including their ‘results from NEARBY cities’ in their RSS feeds. There are a couple problems with this. First, they are mixed in with the results from the main city, so even if you’re only in searching one location, you end up with a bunch of irrelevant results mixed in. If you have feeds from multiple cities (like with SearchTempest) though, it’s worse. Many different cities could include the same ‘nearby’ results, so you could end up with numerous duplicates of the same posts.

I’ve been told that craigslist is looking into how to fix this, so presumably it was an unintentional change, and hopefully it’ll be fixed soon. We have no actual affiliation with or inside knowledge of craigslist though, so really your guess is as good as ours.

If you get tired of waiting, or just like to tinker, it should be possible to de-duplicate your feeds yourself using Yahoo Pipes. Basically you would need a pipe that takes the OPML file from SearchTempest as an input, combines all the feeds within it, and then runs a sort and a unique filter. Here’s one that might be a good start. I haven’t tried it, but it looks like you could feed in the link to the SearchTempest OPML file (by right-clicking on our get rss button and saving the link instead of downloading the file). Then you would just need to add the Unique operator after the sort block. If you’ve never used Pipes before, here’s a tutorial that might help. It doesn’t do exactly what we want, but it should be enough to get the basic idea.

If anyone decides to try the Pipes solution, let us know in the comments! Otherwise, hopefully this bug gets squashed on craigslist’s end soon!