SITE REVIEW: www.wildjohn.com

http://www.wildjohn.com

1) This was a private script I was using for the last 6 months to by and sell all new furniture in my house. By setting this as my homepage, everytime I would open my browser I would see, in pictures, items I was looking for on craigslist. As soon as I would see something that I wanted, I could instantly pounce on good deals and be first.

Craigslist is all about being first to call when someone posts "Selling 6 piece OAK Bedroom Set with Real Gold Trim - $50". Face it, if you wait 3 hours to call, you ain't gunna get that set for $50. But people DO put that stuff on craigslist. Most of the stuff I have bought, was from rich people, that just "want rid of it please take it please please please". So you can pounce and get stuff cheap.

2) This is on an old domain I wasn't using. So I thought I would make the script public now that I have pounced on everything on craigslist, and replaced all the furniture in my house.

The website is temporary, for the following reason:

3) Craigslist won't like the script. They will, given time, send me a nice letter to take it down...and I will. So the goal is not to make the site great, but to make as much traffic and money (ie: google ads or donations), before they find it.

So when you review the site, please think in terms of "How can this site fly high and fast before it dies hard". Once the site dies, I will redirect the residual traffic to a parking page to recoupe any lingering traffic.

Thoughts?

I'd think it would make more sense to dial it down enough that it wouldn't cause CL to block it, and sell the script.

I like the concept of being able to view the images, why does CL not like it?

@CXLink Both websites are providing the same information, just one does it better than the other. Kind of like google, bing and yahoo.

One thing I thought I would mention before I review this, you can only search the US cities. If I try to go into a state it doesn't give me the option to select down to a small region and also nothing shows up for a state.

For example: http://www.wildjohn.com/?city=washington

I really like the tool, but one thought - there's really no way to exclude sections from the search. If I had a way to specify which CL sections I wanted to browse for my city, I could exclude the automotive, etc. and save my time and your bandwidth.

On other website that do similar things to what I am doing, craigslist claims that it increases their bandwidth. However I am caching images, so maybe they will not shut it down. But maybe they don't like it, simply because it takes the focus away from Craigslist.

Craigslist allows Google and Yahoo to crawl their site, but it seems they don't like companies with less than a billion dollars to do the same.


Got suggestions on how I can tone it down? I guess I am working in the dark, since I don't know *exactly why Craigslist doesn't like (other websites that do the same) it. I have not recieved any feedback from them yet - I suspect it will simply be "take it down" and that will be that.

I will try to fix the washington search thing.

I fixed the state thing. But not really how I like it - I simply expanded all the cities within that state. Which means there are two lists.

But either way it works now. Maybe I will redo that again if the script survives.

Really cool script, but...changing cities only works on the first page results. Once you hit "next" it goes back to results for san diego

I think I fixed that. Please check again?

nope, still going back to san diego

I feel you bro I did something very similar to what you are doing I took the same idea as XOM Reviews [domain removed] and handcoded it all in PHP (I hate ASP) - not only that I SEO'd the whole thing to a score of 96% and have better URL rewriting and more advanced search functions than XOM ... like AJAX powered front page and live search prediction with thumbnail preview - feel free to check it out at [domain Removed] P.S. of course I wrote a note to XOM and got a nasty reply from them telling me that I am infringing on about half a dozen copyrights but I dun feel like taking it offline - they can sue all they want - first I'm on a different continent and secondly even if they should invest all the money in lawyers and courts and manage to get a favorable decision in court there is virtually nothing they can get out of me because I just am poor and broke so yeah ... tough break ...