A Pinterest-style View of Craigslist
Reaching 375,000 people per month, Craigslist is still one of the most largely popular sites. Although there is no public API, Web developers have created numerous mash-ups and apps from Craigslist classifieds ads.
For this reason, I decided to add Craigslist integration to the “Socialist” plugin. Socialist is a social plugin for jQuery (soon to be a Wordpress plugin too!) that lets you display Craiglist listings in a Pinterest-style layout thanks to the awesome Isotope plugin from David DeSandro at MetaFizzy.
You can add any Craigslist area and category to the Socialist options when instantiating the plugin with jQuery. Use “areaName” to set the region or city to any of the Craigslist areas. Use “id” to set the category. You can find the 3-letter category code by navigating to a category in Craigslist. Look at the URL, and you’ll see the category code at the end. For example, here is usage of the Boston area, “Boats” category which it located at: http://boston.craigslist.org/boo/
$('#div1').socialist({ networks: [ {name:'craigslist',id:'boo',areaName:'boston'} ], maxResults:12 });
With the Socialist plugin you can add multiple values to the “Networks” option array, so that you can get content from multiple Craiglist sections. Here we grab “boats”,”antiques” and “collectibles” in the Boston area:
$('#div1').socialist({ networks: [ {name:'craigslist',id:'boo',areaName:'boston'},
{name:'craigslist',id:'ata',areaName:'boston'},
{name:'craigslist',id:'cba',areaName:'boston'},
], maxResults:5 });
There are several customizations options for Socialist that enable you to change the layout, set the maximum number of results and set which fields (title, image, etc..) to display. For more details on my awesome “Socialist” social feed plugin, go to: http://plugins.in1.com
