During my last quarter at University of California San Diego, I took the gaming class as many people do during their last quarter. The class consisted of groups of 6 people and you make a 3-D real time video game in 10 weeks. During the 10 week course two of my team mates had to leave to find housing close to their future jobs. They were gone for a week. I figured other groups were in the same dilemma so after the course was over, I created this site to help future students of the gaming course.
I didn't know any PHP or JavaScript before starting this project.
Q&A:
How do I use it?: Watch this video:
I'd like to try it out, what's the URL or website address?
www.RjsHouseHunter.com
How does it work?
The server scrapes listings of craig's list then gets the Lat/Lng of each listing. When you visit the site, you send a point of interest to the server and and distance (default is 10 miles). The server guesstimates all listings around the specific point of interest then sends you all the listings it think might qualify. With the listings, your browser then filters out all listings that don't meet your requirements. All drive times are gathered from Google and calculated one at a time (so not to piss Google off). If the drive time doesn't meet your qualifications, it is dynamically booted off the table and map. In short, php does a little bit of stuff, your browser does almost all the work. A previous version of the site had the browsers doing all the work including scraping and finding the Lat/Lng but my friend complained about the site being too laggy so i changed it.
Why are Oodle listings not available anymore?
After it was up for a few months, friends complained that Oodle had bogus listings so I had to stop using Oodle.
Why are there no listings in my area?
Unfortunately I am not a well off. I have a seven dollar a month server (bluehost.com) and I just don't have the bandwidth or CPU to scrape all of Craigslist so I just target areas where my friends are and where the University of California San Diego is.
How do I support this site?
There is a donate button on the bottom of the page that will help pay for the domain registration and server. It costs about 94 bucks a year for both and I think I have it paid up for until 2011. If I get a significant donation I'll move the site to a much better server and scrape more places. If you are Craigslist, you can support me by taking the JavaScript and putting it as an option on your site.
UPDATE:
The scripts that scrape Craigslist for data are down indefinitely due to my host (bluehost, a 6-8 dollar a month web host) complaining that it was taking up too much resources. If you are looking for a house mapping service, padmapper.com seems to have a pretty good site and looks to do around the same thing.