After getting banned by craigslist a few times I’ve decided it’s time to hang ‘em up.

Craig’s Little Buddy was a harmless site. My friends wanted to search multiple craigslist classifeds at the same time & I hacked together a site with a decent ui to allow them to do just that. Why? Why not? It was easy & it saved my friends a ton of time.

I assumed the fact that I never tried to monetize would keep me in the clear and CL would leave me alone. But, even so, I got banned a few times. To be fair, CL can enforce their TOS if they think I violated it and I’m sure some automated watchdog banned me and I wasn’t singled out; After all, even tho I employed a 6 hour cache, I probably hit them with a more-than-normal-number of http requests.

Even so, I see nothing wrong with a site that’s not monetizing, still sending CL traffic w/ every result click & is saving people a ton of time. With that said I’ve decided to open source the site. There’s no license or any official agreement; I just ask that you use it for personal use on your home machine. Otherwise he’s free as a bird.

Sorry, could’nt resist… LOL

It was fun and very satisfying to read emails about how much value the users gained by a site that took me barely any time to toss together. So thanks to all the people that took their time to write me.

Also, big thanks to Rose Devlin for the cute little logo/mascot guy.

Enjoy,
Arin

Download all the source for CraigsLittleBuddy.com at GitHub

ps: sorry that the code’s kindof a hacky mess . Maybe I’ll clean it up if I have some time.

OK, so this is getting a bit old.

A while ago CraigsList banned the craigslittlebuddy.com server from making any http requests… all http requests resulted in a 403. So that essentially killed the site. I hacked the code and made all search result pages display some note saying CL banned the site and all that jazz. Then one day, out of curiosity, I un-did the “don’t bother searching” hack and it worked again.

That was a couple months ago and the site had no issues for a while… ’till now. Last week I moved the site to my new VPS and kinda hoped things would be OK but within a couple days the 403’s were back.

The interesting thing is that it took the new server/ip just a couple days to get banned whereas the old server was up and running for a couple months without a hitch. I wondering if they happened to whitelist the old machine’s IP and didn’t tell me. Makes sense right? Why would the new server get banned in a couple days when the old one ran w/o issue for weeks/months?

I think I’m gonna try and contact them and see if they’ll be nice enough to whitelist my site. The site’s pretty harmless. Sure, it hit’s their RSS feeds but its not like I get shit tons of traffic… + I do cache stuff to minimize the # of requests. Also, I don’t have any ads or monetization going on which has to be good for a brownie point or 2.

We’ll see what they say…

Craig’s Little Buddy is back!

A few months ago CL banned the server’s IP and no longer allowed the app to access their RSS feeds. That pretty much put an end to little buddy. I set up a Yahoo Pipe hoping to get around the whole issue but Yahoo Pipes has a limit on requests too

Well, a couple weeks ago I got an IM from someone online saying “hey the craigslist thing works again!”. Actually, it didn’t… they’d just found the old, crappy version I had “hidden” on my Dreamhost account. But, this made me curious: “am I un-banned yet?”. So I ssh’ed to the server, un-did the “automatically return ‘no-results found’ & don’t bother hitting CL” portion of the code and, voila, it worked.

So, for now, Craig’s Little Buddy is back in action. I don’t have too much faith that CL will let it be… I assume they’ll block the IP again but, for now, he’s up ‘n runnin’

I haven’t written anything of substance for a while and due to today’s link love from TechCrunch I thought I’d write a quick ‘lil update.

As mentioned in the TechCrunch article and a couple of my (sort-of) recent posts Craig’s Little Buddy is no longer. I got banned! Boo on Craig’s List for being so lame about it. Eh, but a few long lasting bits of goodness came about from that project:

• Craig’s Little Buddy was a “facade”. The “real” project was a MVC framework (for PHP). It’s way too boring to write a framework w/ no visual payoff so I used Little Buddy to satisfy the give-me-something-i-can-see itch. Plus, I had to have some real world, app development scenarios to run through. So I worked on both in parallel. The framework works and is pretty sweet. It’s currently running on Blip.fm and some time soon I’ll document the bastard & open source it.
• The project also helped me get this job at Digg. Prior to my phone screen with Joe Stump I zipped up and emailed him the entire code base for the site as a code sample. I’m sure that helped out a ton (I did get the gig).

First off, I’m no longer the Lead Engineer of Blip.fm; I am now working at Digg as a member of their Core Infrastructure team. So, what happened? Why’d you leave?. Well, it’s really a personal choice. I’m a big fan of the Blip.fm product (I did come up with the idea ) and have nothing but awesome things to say about the entire team there. It’s a personal thing and when the opportunity at Digg became a legit option I got really stoked about it and made the jump.

Digg’s a pretty sweet place to work. I’m liking it here. The culture jives with me, I love the product and there’s a ton of smart folks that I get a chance to learn from and work with. … And as a bonus the offices are just a few blocks from Blip.fm so my commute is exactly the same… I’m a creature of habit .

Alirghty – what else?

I turned 30 on August 1^st! Pretty crazy. I’m officially “old” (no offense to pre-1978 peeps). My birthday was great. My girlfriend kicked ass at putting together a sweet party and I got some badass gifts including:

• A 52 inch LCD TV from my family
• A PS3
• A one of a kind, prototype, Music Man bass. It’s a BFR Sterling with an awesome quilted, maple top. It’s awesome! You can check out pix over on my Flickr page. This was a gift from Sterling Ball and all the great folks over at Ernie Ball/Music Man.

So, things are good

I’m slowly starting work on a few tiny side projects. One of ‘em requires code to access IMAP via PHP; I hate don’t like the packages available on PEAR so I’m writing one. I’m documenting this as I code so I’ll open source it once it’s ready. This project will also use the MVC framework I baked up so I’ll put some polish on that fucker and open source it too. I’ll keep you posted on that stuff and link to the packages once they’re documented with how-to’s and all that good stuff.

I guess that’s it. Oh ya, I almost forget: I finally got a Sadowsky!

That’s all folks. Stay tuned for a review on the Sadowaky and some other random bullshit.

So, unfortunately it looks like CraigsList has banned the Craig’s Little Buddy server’s IP from accessing the CL RSS feeds. This pretty much fucks everything up

I could dance around it a few ways:

• change the IP of the server
• use a proxy server to fetch the RSS
• make the RSS fetches via Yahoo Pipes
• etc, etc

There’s stuff I could do but in the end you gotta ask “is the juice worth the squeeze?”. I think it may not be here. Some of the possible solutions are temporary (like changing IPs or even using a public proxy) b/c the new/different IP will get banned.

The interesting solution would be to use Yahoo pipes or even put something on EC2 or Google AppsEngine and essentially setup my own proxy of sorts; would craigslist ban Yahoo, Amazon and/or Google? That would be interesting to explore… but what if they decide to just sue me at that point?

Their TOU does say you cant use automated means to get their content. So, essentially, they did “warn” me in the TOU.

But, seriously. What the fuck is their problem? I had no ads on the site, I wasn’t demolishing their servers with millions of hits a day and every single CL ad I show linked to the original CL post… so I was sending them traffic. I have no idea why this pissed them off. Odds are some monitor just noticed the IP hitting em a lot more than a human would and I was banned via automated means. Even so, I have zero hope in getting an “Oh, woops. Ya, that’s cool. We’ll turn you back on” type of reply if I contact ‘em.

Anywho. I’ll email them once I’m less annoyed. I just wanted to keep you guys posted since I was getting a bunch of emails asking what was going on with the site.

Thanks to all the peeps out there that used, evangelized and liked the site I’m glad I was able to help ya guys out.

Booya!