I spend a lot of time browsing Craigslist. Possibly too much. But I find the reason I spend so much time looking is because it’s really tricky to filter out good stuff from spam and nonsense. I also can’t easily get notifications of good stuff in real time so I miss out on things often. So in normal software developer fashion, I over-engineered myself a solution. I’ve been interested in scraping Craigslist since i was a kid, but they sort of frown upon it. I found that Elixir’s pattern matching makes searching HTML really easy to work with.

Anyway here’s the source. I didn’t really built it with the intent of anyone besides me using it, but it certainly is possible to add it to other servers.

Here’s a screenshot of how it looks.

Screenshot%20from%202018-12-29%2013-02-571318×771 57.7 KB

I can’t say this was a great idea, but it’s been pretty useful for at least the last couple days i’ve had it running.