RSS feeds and craigslist?

[dawyatt]

I am sure everyone has seen craigslist... and possibly oogle.com ...

I was out on oogle last night and realized that a lot of their listings have been generated by using an rss feed from craigslist...

It seems like a cool way to ad listings, but I am wondering how they were able to format the feed to fit into their already existing site structure...

they always link back to craigslist... I would just want listings local to my area to stay in tune with my site format...

Has anyone else explored this issue and if so, comments...

Actually, anyone can comment or input...

[Eric Barnes]

I have never messed with this to much but you may want to check out a php script named magpie rss. It will format rss feeds and can be added to your site.

[juven14]

One idea would be to insert a feed using the RSS Module - into showlistings.tpl.php then set it up to display different feeds based on the category id or etc. You have total control on how those feeds are displayed.

[Lhotch]

RSS is actually very simple and parsing an RSS stream with PHP is also pretty simple assuming you know a little about php.

Keep in mind though that displaying a feed and actually importing the feed into you system as actual ads are 2 very different things and importing the rss stream into your classifieds database brings with it a whole slew of hurdles.

[dawyatt]

I was thinking of somehow displaying the feed info in a separate section/page..but trying to somehow keep a good flow or similar layout with my 68 listings...

Is anyone doing something similar to this?

I am not wanting to incorporate the feed data into my database... that is way over my ability and patience level!

Magie...I am pretty new to the rss stuff and I am learning as I go... so magpie with break the feed into managable parts? am I understanding this corrrectly... and what is the latest version of magpie since I went out on what I thought was their site and the ver. indicated something created in the 90s'....

thanks guys for your input...

[juven14]

Yes, magpie is one of the best I've found. It is what processes the feeds in the rss module.

It is broken into parts you can manage at the template level. Just remember the feeds are looped, and that will be something you deal with for any parser. You can use magpie within smarty as the module does, or in regular php pages. I left the documentation in the module structure.

Another one I used in the past was RSS2HTML. It also pretty good, though not as easy to use and setup as magpie. Plus, I've found magpie is really good about custom namespaces where others I've tried must have specific ones relating to the type of feed they process.