I have a friend that just bought a place in West LA, which means he has a brand new canvas of open space to work with to place furniture and stuff. Having been inspired by Apartment Therapy before (See Above), I thought it would be a good place to get some of the latest ideas and low and behold, they just had their 2007 Smallest Coolest Apartment Contest.
Many of you might think that some of these places cost a fortune to decorate, but I’m here to tell you that you can use the power of your RSS Reader to pimp out your pad for cheaper than you think. (What is RSS?)
Most of you know that Craiglist is the greatest place to find almost anything you need, following the motto “One man’s garbage is another man’s treasure!” In Los Angeles, I know that the furniture section is one of the best places to find hidden treasures, but the hard part is knowing when those hidden treasures reveal themselves.
Well, that’s where RSS comes in. I’m a big fan of West Elm Furniture, so before Craigslist put the RSS Feature, I would just go to Craiglist > Furniture and then do a search for “West Elm.” The hard part was knowing when the furniture is being listed, so you can be the first one to email and call dibs on it. The problem is solved with the simple RSS link that Craiglist added to the bottom of their search results as shown here:
Click on the “RSS” link and you’ll get a long url that looks like this:
http://losangeles.craigslist.org/search/fur?query=west+elm+futon&minAsk=min&maxAsk=max&addTwo=by-owner&format=rss
Now put that url in your RSS reader and you’ll know when someone is selling a West Elm Futon as soon as your reader refreshes it’s feeds! Since Craigslist started their RSS feature last year, I’ve found a bunch of furniture for my place for an average saving of about 65% off retail prices. Maybe if you hurry, you can get some new furniture and enter my Best Home Workstation Contest which will be ending this month, so get a move on!
And since you’ll be adding feeds to your reader, don’t forget to copy and paste my feed to your reader if you haven’t done so already: http://feeds.feedburner.com/MrGaryLee - Thanks! You’re the best!
- Vote for this Post on Technorati WTF
StumbleUpon | Digg | Del.icio.us | Dzone | Newsvine | Spurl | Reddit | Yahoo! MyWeb
Popularity: 24% [?]
- I’m Really Giving Away a Free iPhone
- Top 10 Blogging Topics
- Review My Blog
- Reasons You Shouldn’t Be a Blogger
- Welcome John Chow Readers!
I can just see some MTV “Cribs” show - “…and I pimped my pad using my Craigslist RSS feed and some advice from Gary Lee, God almighty.”
It kills me.
Very cool…idea…i had never thought of using the RSS feed function in that way…maybe cause i dont buy too many things of Craigslist..!!
i don’t need no RSS - you IM me every time you see something from West Elm!
Interesting idea… I’m gonna try it with my trash
Hello,
I found your site on technorati on WTF section…. and you caught my eye for 2 reasons: the decoration info and my man has the same name as you except he’s a DR instead of an MR…. totally cool… I need to check out your site more…. We are into HGTV & Fineliving and now that I found your site, I’ll show it to my man! He will definitely be very surprised, you have no idea. Thank you >^.^
Nice information.I love read in your blog
http://cybergold.blogspot.com
Very timely and my pad definitely needs pimping! I like West Elm and drool over the stuff in Room & Board.
Any word on the best “free stuff” boards on Craigslist? The offerings in Chicago are quite paltry, actually…
The only reason I know is because I’m getting set to move into my first new place next month (woo-hoo!) So if anyone here lives in the Chicago area and has some cool stuff you don’t need anymore, please let me know!
Never thought of using RSS on Craigslist… great tip!
Interesting idea, I guess you could apply it to dating stuff too. You could set up an RSS feed to show you left-handed arm-wrestling investment bankers age 25-30 who enjoy Orson Welles movies.