Craigslist programming API on rentrent.org (Alpha)

API documentation has a new home on:

http://www.rentrent.org/RENT/API/index.html


15 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice site. Can you add Ventura County? I would love to see data near my house.

Keep up the good work.

Anita Kale said...

Very useful application.

Jen said...

Love it!!!!

usriv said...

Great work with the site! Is craigslist crawled everyday or queries on demand. E.g, I could find something through craigslist that didnt show up on your website.

e.g.,
http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sby/apa/850398982.html

Joe Irvine said...

Craigslist is crawled approximately every couple of hours. Also the crawling is not threaded.

Craigslist provide such a great service for free and I didn't want to overload their servers with too many requests and cause them problems.

Joe.

Moshe said...

Hi, I tried to use it in actionscript 3 project but I got a parsing error. The problem is that the format of your output throw error in flash. everything should be with quotation marks. for example:
{'Status':'Success', Data:{'862458010':{'AdPostingId':'862458010',

Can you add the quotation marks. if not can I have access to your script?

Thanks
- Moshe

Joe Irvine said...

I have never tested this on actionscript. Are you sure even numbers need to be in quotes?
I will support an extra parameter called 'output=actionscript'.

Send your email address to rentrentorg@gmail.com. I want to use your help in make this API flash compatible.

Thanks,
Joe

ashoon said...

This is fantastic. Only suggestion would be to produce more specific urls. Here's hoping craiglist lets this develop!

Brittany said...

This is great info to know.

T.C. said...

I'm looking to use this API to aggregate data and process it (once per day, once I have the code done). Any chance you would allow me to use a special key or some such that would simply dump all of the postings in the database? It's currently giving me "Too many properties to show on the map." from Ads.aspx

I'm trying to avoid doing a screen scrape of craigslist for my sanity.

RentRent.Org said...

By default API caps at 200 ads per request.
You can use a parameter 'maxrecords' to fetch upto 2000 listings.

I was thinking of adding a feature that will allow you download all the listings for a county using one request. I will let you know as soon as I have that feature ready.

Anonymous said...

Dude - your site rocks. You are the Muhammad Ali of Awesome Website Creators.

Shawn said...

Hi, Thanks for a great tool. It seems to actually include all of the data that is on craigslist for the day, which is good-- not all of them do for some reason.

I would LOVE, LOVE, LOVE it if in rental mode it used showed the price instead of the number of rooms (which is not accurate anyway in that mode) and if it used the color to show if there is a picture or not.

Also, it would be way cool to filter by listings that have pictures

Finally, sometimes I want to filter for places less than $650, forcing $700 is an entirely different price point in rental markets, so maybe better to make it an editable dropdown.

Have I told you that you are awesome today? Because you are-- this tool has already saved me a lot of time-- and I haven't gotten you anything, so thanks. I owe you one!

Kindly,

-s

RentRent.Org said...

Thanks Shawn for the great suggestions.
I will try to add the features your requested during next update.

royce said...

Hey there, I am checking out your API, I sent you an email about some JSON issues in PHP. I was able to hack together some code to resolve most of them. But you can still take a look at it if you wish.

I wasn't able to get the output=actionscript command to work.

Also, do you plan to scrape any of the other CL categories such as sale/wanted?