27 August 2008

Feeding eBay [Quick Tips]

I covered the fine art of subscribing to feeds from Flickr a while back, but today I wanted to give a quick tip on subscribing to feeds from ebay.

If you're particularly interested in a certain city, state or area, checking ebay on occasion is a good move, as interesting photos, postcards, letters, even newspapers, magazines and other historic items often appear up for sale on the site. Even if you're not interested in purchasing the items, just browsing can be a rewarding experience.

Since we're all about being automated and having our content come to us, let's subscribe to an RSS feed for our ebay search!

Enter Your Search Term

Even if you've never used ebay before, the site layout is relatively easy to use for our purposes. Just focus on the big search field at the top of the homepage. Enter the location you are interested in, and use the drop-down menu to select a category to search in. I like to use the "Collectibles" category, which seems to be a catch-all for historical items:



Locate the Feed Button

After you click the Search button, you'll be presented with a page of results. Note that you can refine your results using the sub-categories on the left-hand side:


Once you have refined your results (if desired), find the RSS-feed button on the bottom of the page:



Click the button and follow instructions particular to your feed reader.

Sit Back and Enjoy

Here's a glimpse of what my ebay feed looks like in Google Reader:



Success! Now I can peruse posted items of interest without having to remember to go to ebay to look!

2 comments:

A rootdigger said...

Now that is a great post. It is a good source of information, that I can now check out. Thanks.

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.