"My method for trolling through Craigslist is to grab RSS feeds for all the major cities where I’m interested and setup in Google Reader"
I built a quick app a few years ago that helped out with this tremendously. I would feed the app a list of craigslist cities I wanted to watch, and it would grab the RSS of the web/info design section for that city. It would parse the feed and dump the jobs into a database. It would load new jobs with a cron that ran a few times a day.
The dashboard page showed a list of jobs that hadn't been acted on yet. You could easily eliminate a job with an [X] button, or move them into a "save for later" area. You'd have to act on every job, but it was quick to do so. Then the app had a built-in responder that allowed me to initiate the conversation from within in the app.
After putting this thing together, I got a total of 2 good jobs off of CL. I quit looking for freelance jobs shortly after but may start up again once I'm done with my masters.
You get a bookmarklet to save a listing from any site, keep track of the relevant bits of data (company, square feet, salary, bedrooms, mileage, etc), and move them through a little workflow (interested, applied, contacted, lost, etc).
You can use it for jobs, apartments, cars, dates, whatever! All the fields and workflows are completely customizable.
It's been on the backburner for a while, since my day job has gotten busy, so there's no help available and signups are invite-only right now. But you guys seem like the kind of people who can figure it out pretty easily ;)
I built a quick app a few years ago that helped out with this tremendously. I would feed the app a list of craigslist cities I wanted to watch, and it would grab the RSS of the web/info design section for that city. It would parse the feed and dump the jobs into a database. It would load new jobs with a cron that ran a few times a day.
The dashboard page showed a list of jobs that hadn't been acted on yet. You could easily eliminate a job with an [X] button, or move them into a "save for later" area. You'd have to act on every job, but it was quick to do so. Then the app had a built-in responder that allowed me to initiate the conversation from within in the app.
After putting this thing together, I got a total of 2 good jobs off of CL. I quit looking for freelance jobs shortly after but may start up again once I'm done with my masters.