I Heart Craig.

I love Craig’s List – do you? If you don’t have a clue what I’m talking about, TRUST ME when I say all you thrifty types will LOVE IT. It’s basically a giant, internet, garage sale.

It’s better than Ebay because it’s local. You drive to someone’s house, you chat about all the good times their kids had with the train table, you talk about surprising your two year old with the train table, and you thank them for the great cookies and coffee offered when you arrived.

Okay, maybe it’s not always like that, exactly, but there’s definitely more personality to it than traditional online purchasing.

As much as I like it, though, I often feel overwhelmed by it. It’s constantly being updated, so I feel like I have to check in often in order to find what I’m looking for. I forget to do this, see, because I’m addicted to my reader. In fact, I might go for days without checking the site, and then become frustrated that I can’t keep up.

This week it occurred to me to see if Craig’s List has an RSS feed, and do you know what? IT DOES! So now I run a search of what I am looking for – say, “rug” in “babies and kids” – and subscribe to the feed for that search via my Google Reader. SHAZAM! Every time a post is added that fits that search criteria it appears in my reader, which I check several times a day.

And you know what else? It’s actually easier to read the content in my reader because the body of the posts are included – no more clicking on each post title to find out what it says.

That, my friends, is called usability.

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