craigslist, love it or hate it, is a great site to find.. well.. anything. However you’re limited to searching just one local area at a time.

However you can search multiple areas via the use of a particular web site and an RSS reader (like Google Reader, Feed Demon or even Windows Live Mail or Mozilla Thunderbird) to get the job done.

The web site to use is crazedlist.org, but from the moment you visit that site a big nastygram appears in the middle of your browser (which is not an ad). It says you can either mess around with your browser to disable referrers, or use RSS feeds instead.

Trust me when I say the RSS way is much easier. And more convenient.

Let’s say for the moment you want to perform a nationwide search of craigslist. If you do this directly via the crazedlist.org web site, so much data will be pushed to your browser that it will crash it, and your IP address will be flagged as "bad" by craigslist.

Instead, you do a nationwide search this way. For demonstrative purposes, we’ll use Google Reader to handle the feeds.

From the top left drop-down we select all. You immediately get a warning:

Click OK.

For our example search, we’ll use "1967 camaro". Here’s how I filled mine out:

• Search for 1967 camaro
• in sale/wanted
• cars & trucks (all)
• No price selected
• "Pics" checked for "ads must have photos"

DO NOT click the Search button. Repeat: DO NOT do that.

Click the big orange Get RSS Feeds button instead.

You will see this:

In Firefox: Right-click "this link" and choose "Save Link As"

In Internet Explorer: Right-click "this link" and choose "Save Target As"

When the save screen appears, change Save as type: to All Files, and type in the file name as 1967 camaro.opml, like this:

Now all we have to do is import this into Google Reader.

Note before continuing: Just about every RSS Reader has the ability to import standardized OPML files. Whether you’re using an app or a web site, they all should have some ability to import OPML.

With Google Reader it’s very easy to import an OPML file. You go to www.google.com/reader, login with your Google account (such as a Gmail account), then click Settings at the extreme top right, then the Import/Export tab, like this:

From here you click the Browse button, go to the Desktop where you saved the OPML file and upload it.

In a US nationwide search, this results in 328 feed subscriptions. When you click Back to Google Reader, it will look something like this:

All subscriptions will be listed by state abbreviation then locale for "1967 camaro", all with photos.

Why is it OK to multi-search craigslist the RSS way and not direct via crazedlist.org?

It’s for the reasons crazedlist.org states. Having a mountain of data sent to your browser has a high tendency of crashing it, and craigslist is very wise to those who make unreasonable search requests from their servers. And yes, performing a massive nationwide search is considered unreasonable and they will block your IP in short order.

RSS feeds on the other hand are much more "civil". Furthermore they act as a saved search of sorts. Once you import it all into Google Reader or other feed reader, any new listings that match your keywords will show up.