CraigsList Email Notifications

Wouldn't it be nice if you could receive a little email message when that collectible widget is up for sale on CraigsList.org. Unlike eBay, there is no built in little saved search in CraigsList. You have to check every day and you can miss a day or just get tired of looking and finding nothing.

There is however a free, easy and uncomplicated way to receive notifications when something appears on CraigsList.org.

Here's how you do it.

First, you need to search Google for the item. Google, it turns out, is very interested in CraigsList and checks it frequently. In my example I am looking for "vacuum tubes", those old glass electronic instruments that used to power every radio and TV. I collect certain kinds of vacuum tubes and equipment that uses them.

Here is a typical Google search:

"vacuum tube"

As you can see, I put quotation marks around the search because I don't want to find pages that have words vacuum and tube randomly scattered around the page. I need pages that have the exact phrase.

I can now refine that by saying that I want to search only the Boston CraigsList. The address of the Boston CraigsList is boston.craigslist.org. I can tell Google to search only the Boston CraigsList by entering:

"vacuum tube" site:boston.craigslist.org

This search will show me all the things on the Boston CraigsList with the phrase "vacuum tube" in it. As I write this I find 27 items, but most are a week or more old.

You, of course, might not live near Boston, so you would use the correct CraigsList. Go to CraigsList.org, click on the city nearest you and see what the site address is show in the browser address area. You might see Alaska.craigslist.org or newyork.cragislist.org or delhi.craigslist.co.in.

After checking that you typed everything right and you do indeed find things at craigslist, it is time to use Google email alerts.

Use the mouse to highlight the search phrase you typed in and copy it. Use your browser to go to www.google.com/alerts.

There is a dialog box that asks for search items, type, how often and your email address.

Put the search phrase (including the site: information) into the search items box.

Select  "Web" from the type drop down, and make select "Daily" from the how often drop down. Next put your email into the email box and press select alert.

If you are not using a Gmail account, you must confirm your email address. Google will send you an email and you have to click on the link in it to confirm. Also, if you are not using a Gmail account, you are limited to 10 alerts. I suggest getting a Gmail account. I like the service and it lets you control all of your alerts from one screen.

Once a day you will receive a nice little notification about your CraigsList search if Google finds anything. If Google hasn't found anything, you won't get any notification. Also you won't receive more than 10 listings a day in the email.

I find that my searches usually arrive in a bunch in the morning, but sometimes they don't arrive until well into the afternoon. They do come, however, and are usually not long after the listing appears.

First Week Tappan Zee Express Summary

I found that I can stand it on the bus. Most trips are only 40 minutes, even in bad traffic. I don't do much better with the truck.

I discovered that the seats or so cramped and that the bus bounces around so much that it is nearly impossible to type on the computer. I keep bringing it, though, in case the bridge backs up and we are not moving for a long period of time.

Today, the day be for the long Fourth of July Weekend, I discovered one very bad thing about the commute. My boss usually lets us out an hour early before a holiday. My bus normally leaves at 4:30. The next earlier bus leaves at 3:08. He came to my cubicle at 3:15 and told be I could go home. I am stuck here until 4:30, no matter what.

Running your car on wine

Prince Charles made headlines this week when it transpired that his Aston Martin DB5 sports car has been converted to run on wine and cheese – or at least bio-ethanol distilled from locally-produced wine and then improved with alcohol extracted from fermented whey, a bi-product of cheese making.

I discovered this while debugging my BioFuel digest automatic blog. Next I am going to make one for cute cat pictures.

Running your car on wine

Jackson Pollock's hi-fi

Jackson Pollock's Speaker-in-a-closet was speckled with paint like one of his paintings. He used a nice loud Bogen DB-20 as his amplifier.

I have a Bogen db-20 (garage sale find). I have only fired it up once, and it sounded great. When I get my house on the Maine coast, I'll find a good spot for it with one of my Dad's turntables. I might even speckle the speaker cabinet like Jackson Pollock.

"Pollock loved to play his hi-fi really loud, especially when Krasner was out of the house. Some things never change."

MobyGames - Developer BIO

A while ago I reverse engineered some old Adventure text games and rewrote them using JavaScript so that would run off of web pages. I haven't thought about these games for several years.

I just found out that as a result of my writing these programs, I am now listed at MobyGames as a game developer. Over the years I have written many text based games in basic, java, PHP and even COBOL. Writing a text adventure is like writing a short story, but I never thought to call myself a Game Developer.

I am almost tempted to put this on my resume.

MobyGames - Keith P. Graham

On the Bus - Day 3

I brought the little computer with me. It has a 600Mhz mobile processor that makes it very slow to boot up. I got it going and the battery lasted the whole 40 minutes of the trip and the display claimed that it had an hour and a half to spare. I did not however have any word processor installed, so there was not much accomplished except to do some configuration.

The bus seats are too close together and I was so cramped that I could not get in a comfortable position to type. I will copy Office XP to a USB drive and do the MS Word install on the way home. I am going to follow the wikihow.com article on How to Dramatically Speed up Windows XP. I am also looking to see if I can bump up the memory on the laptop to one or two gigs, which should speed up everything. Older memory is much more expensive than new memory, however.

I will also copy my work-in-progress folder to a USB drive and maybe actually write a thousand words on each trip.

Justine's Pictures of Gingerbread Houses on Martha's Vineyard

Justine sent me more pictures from Martha's Vineyard.

There are different kinds of houses on Martha's Vineyard. The older or classic style of the island homes is the Salt Box, which is a simple cedar shingle covered structure, typically with a shed roof to the north side and 1-1/2 stories facing the south. These are designed for efficient heating and resistance to the storms that cross the island.

The island's whaling industry collapsed towards the end of the 19th century and was replaced with the summer colonies that are still present today. The Victorian style houses date from middle of the 19th century to the around 1900. There are also Bungalow style houses from the turn of the century through the middle of the 20th century.

The "painted lady" style of decorative painting is actually not historically correct for this region. It is recently borrowed from the San Francisco fashion of decorating the ornamentation of the Victorian houses with bright colors. A real east coast Victorian house was never pink, orange or lavender until recently.

You will notice that there is a stiff breeze blowing in all of the photographs below that causes all the trees and houses to list badly. It is as I have always said, Justine is "a bubble off plumb". 

Ward's father-in-law

My youngest Brother, Ward, lives and works up in Rochester, NY. His father-in-law lives on an historic piece of land and has found many treasures with his metal detector and in local lakes.

The local paper had a nice right-up on him. That's Ward's Father-in-Law, Eugene R. Frost, in the picture.

Buried treasure offers history lessons in Schuyler | stargazette.com

TZ Express - Day 2

Here's the cost breakdown for crossing the bridge in the truck.

1) The truck get's 16 miles to the gallon. It is 15 miles (a little less) each way. Gas costs a minimum of $4 per gallon. That's $7.50 per day. (Gas is supposed to hit $5 this weekend and maybe $7 or $8 before the end of the summer.)

2) Parking costs $90 per month. I like to figure I work 20 days per month so that is about $4.50 per day to park.

3) The TZ bridge toll is $4.50 one way, but I have the commuter plan which is $2.00 each for 20 trips.

Total cost (not counting wear and tear, depreciation, maintenance and insurance) is about $14.00 per day. I like to think in terms of before tax so I can count the cost as fraction of my gross salary. That would be more than $20 a day. That means that I have to have to make an extra $4,800 per year to pay for the cost of commuting.

This is actually cheap compared to the commute to wall street that I used to make. That was about $30 a day before taxes, but I was making $75/hour, but (sigh) those days are long gone and I have to count my pennies.

1) The bus costs $1.05 each way.

2) I have to drive 2 miles each way to catch the bus. That's $1 per day. I could walk to the bus, and I should, but so far that hasn't happened, as I need that extra half hour of sleep in the morning.

The Bus to work costs me $3.10 per day. I will be saving net after taxes about $11 per day which is $2,650 per year. (That's about $4,000 of my salary in savings.)

So, there is no logical choice but to take the bus.

An interesting point; you would think that the bus would be crowded with the economics so far in favor of the bus over driving. The bus, however, is only about half full. Almost everyone get's a seat to themselves with no one sitting next to them.

The morning bus leaves at 8:04am. There are two busses, an express and a local. The Express doesn't go all the way to my job, but stops only a block away. I can take either. They arrive at 20 or 10 minutes before 9. If I miss the first, I can take the next. If I miss either, I can get to work a little late by waiting a half hour. The bridge is normally backed up, but the schedule seems to take this into account.

There are several types of people on the bus.

First, are business people, mostly women, who are on their way to an office in White plains. There are not many men, so I guess us macho American types prefer to drive our gas guzzlers to work.

Second, are non-office workers going to jobs in White Plains. These might not have cars or the money to guzzle their way across the bridge.

Third, are families. There are always several women with children and couples who take the bus, but I am not sure why.

Last, are drug addicts going across the bridge to score crack in the relatively urban White Plains, or Yonkers. White Plains has a daytime weekday population estimated at 250,000 and is a conduit for drugs coming out of NY City. Westchester County has a resident population of about a million and would be considered a major urban center if it were not overshadowed by New York City just to the south.

In the morning there are mostly office types, mostly women. In general, the riders seem to be about half from India. The rest are Hispanic or Haitian.

The 4:30pm bus, coming back to West Nyack, is non-office workers. I would guess that most office workers would return at 5:30pm or 6:00pm. As a county worker, I am limited to working 7 hours a day because of the unions here, even if I am not in the union. I can get out of work at 4:30 and that is the major appeal of this job.

The bus is bouncy and I am prone to car sickness. The bus fumes are nauseating. I listened on my iPod to part of Ayn Rand's the Fountainhead (pretentious crap) and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter Thompson (second rate William Burroughs). I finally settled on Jack London's The Sea Wolf, which is as good as it gets. I might bring a print book to read if I can fight off the motion sickness. I have an older tiny Toshiba Satellite laptop computer from Justine that is very cute, but a little slow. It is light and I can use it to try some writing. I have to charge up the battery and see how long it lasts.

One of these days I will have to get some pictures of the trip.

NASA Animation of Phoenix Mars Lander

I just clicked on the NASA.gov site to see what was new. I became engrossed in the various animations created from NASA images and this one, which is composite of artistic and real images.



I am having trouble with this. It does not want to embed correctly. Click here to play the movie.

Blogger Blog This

You can see a new icon on the bottom of each post.

This runs a little JavaScript routine that opens up the blogger "new post" window and lets anyone who uses blogger.com blog about my blog post. Just click the image and a blogger.com user now has a new blog entry.

This version is blogger specific. I also have a version that I'm going to add to my non-blog web sites. I should write up a technical explanation, but it is one of those things that is easy to reverse engineer for a technical person, but is hard to explain to a non-technical person.

Justine's Vacation on Martha's Vineyard

Justine sent me some pictures of the house she stayed at in Martha's Vineyard. She was on the West side of the Island, near Gay Head Lighthouse (named for the gayly colored mud).

My friend Phil likes to take pictures of the mud bath near Gay Head. There is a place where multicolor mud comes down the side of the cliff there and people like to take mud baths, often in the nude.

Justine just sent me pictures of the house - no muddy nudes. It looks like a very very nice place, but she did not invite me or Larry out for the trip. Then again, Larry and I did not invite her on our trip.

Here is a picture from the web of Gay Head and the colored cliffs.

Unique Visitors Must Die

Jacob Nielsen has a new article on reducing bounce rates on websites. I have a lot of clicks into what Nielsen calls a deep web page, and then the user is gone. I'd like for surfers to hang around and try a few more pages. I will try to follow some of his recommendations.

While I am on the subject of traffic, I have been following a discussion of Chitika premium ads. Chitika is sort of like AdSense, except their ads are not as smart in some ways. They show ads that will get clicks, no matter what the content on your page. The trade off is that an AdSense ad shows ads targeted to the people interested in your page content. Chitika ads are targeted to a more general reader and they pay better. You can have both types of ads, but it does clutter your page.

The new Chitika premium ads are only shown to users who have hit your site through a search engine. Your normal users will see no ad. Chitika says that most normal surfers ignore ads, but that users using search engines are much more likely to click an ad. The ads are geared towards the keyword search from the search engine and not the content on the page. This is pretty slick. I put the ads on one website and I tripled the Chitika revenue, but it is still not as good as AdSense. The Chitika ads still look too much like ads and people don't like to click ads.

Since the new ads are like affiliate links and don't pay per click, it may be a while before I see the real revenue from these ads. I'll keep you posted.


Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox
Chitika

On the Bus

I took the bus this morning from West Nyack to White Plains. It was awful and I still feel sick.

The NYS Thruway was backed up from the bridge 10 miles because of an early morning accident. The bus schedule was all screwed up. I caught a local version of the TZ Express at about 8:20. It made stops all the way from West Nyack to South Nyack and then stopped along rte. 119 in Westchester. I got off at 9:06 (there is a digital clock in the bus).

The smell of the fumes and the bouncing quickly made me sick. I was listening to Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The thought of all those drugs in the book made me feel sick, too.

I missed my big comfortable gas guzzling truck.

Here's a quote from Hunter S. Thompson:

Old elephants limp off to the hills to die; old Americans go out to the highway and drive themselves to death with huge cars.

Three Lakes

Erica and I went down into New Jersey to a community garage sale at Morse Lake. The sale was mostly a waste, but we had a good time driving around the lake.

Here are some of the views around Morse Lake

 

 

 

From Morse Lake we went to what I think is Glenn Wild Lake. (Erica thinks it might be upper Morse Lake.) We took tiny roads where the truck could barely make it through and saw beautiful scenes of nature. The small communities that live at these lakes are different from the snobby "summer people" that go to other destinations. Some of these houses date back to the 1920s and most are handed down through families for years.

 

 

Then on the way back, we stopped by Eagle Lake, where I learned to swim back in the 1950s. The lake was abandoned for many years, but has since been cleaned up somewhat. The lump of green is an island. My Grandfather built a bridge out of logs and branches to the island and he cleaned it up and put a picnic bench on it. The place was so overgrown that I could not get near the place where the bridge was located.

Hacking Google Alerts

I've been receiving Google Alerts for a couple of months now and they have resulted in about 20 blog entries. I think that this is a very useful product.

You may not realize this, but I have 6 other blogs. I have a couple of Harmonica related blogs, the cat blog, a tech blog and another blog that I don't really use much anymore. I also have a blog that use for testing template features and that one gets a few hits because I discuss ways to use css and html to format a blog.

I find the Google Alerts very helpful in providing content for my blogs. I like the Nyack alert because it keeps me updated on what's happening in my home town, especially which of my old friends and neighbors have been arrested. I come from a part of Nyack, called Central Nyack, that can be a rough neighborhood.

For every blog entry I get from Google Alerts, I discard 40 or 50. It occurred to me that these alerts are of interest, even though they might not make a good blog entry. I decided to revive the idea of a Blog Carnival - a blog consisting of nothing but links. I started this morning to write the code to convert the alerts automagically into blog entries and I am making progress. I am trying to design it as open ended as I can so that I can make many blog carnivals and let them run without my intervention. These, of course, will be monetized with ads so that they will make me money.

I'll let you know when I finish the project. I was thinking of having carnivals for "Bio Fuel", "Cats", various harmonica stuff, maybe something with science fiction related announcements, and "Nyack". I am thinking about having some medical related lists that might link to higher paying ads. Once I get it working, I can have as many blogs, automatically fed by the alerts, as I wish. I would just have to compose a template for each one.

First cut on this for the google alert biofuel is at http://www.gthread.com/alert

I expect that I will be able to improve a little on performance by caching the results, but all the parts are there except the formatting.