Use Blogging Tools to Pimp Your Pad

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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.

AT Smallest Coolest Apartment Apartment Therapy Smallest Coolest Apartment Apartment Therapy Smallest Coolest Apartment

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:

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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!

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