Ebay search results through RSS

Thanks to John for pointing me to this script's author. The author, his post and the original code is from Waxy.org.

This PHP script executes a search on ebay for a specified item and then returns the results as an RSS feed that you can put into your News Reader. The search results will be updated on the same schedule as your blog reads etc.

For example, I am currently looking for lenses for my Olympus Camera. I submitted a search for this and put the results into my News Reader and this is what it looks like (screen capture).

It's very easy to implement. You need to be able to run php on your server, of course. Instructions for implementing within Movable Type follow in the extended although you don't need MT to use this script. Alternately, just upload the php file to your server and point your browser to it to open it up and follow steps 7-9 below.

1. Download the script. (The script needs no modification. Simply unzip it and then open up the file in Notepad or any other editor and copy and paste as described in Step 4 below.)
2. Open up your MT Templates listing.
3. Create a new index template. Call it Ebay Search and specify ebay.php as the output file.
4. Paste the php script from Notepad into the body of the template.
5. Save and rebuild this template (*use the rebuild option at the bottom, next to the Save button to get the option to rebuild this page only.)
6. View your new page either with the "View This Page" link on the rebuild pop-up or by using your browser to go to "www.yourdomain.com/ebay.php" (or it may be in a subdirectory, depending on your server directory set-up - it should be in the same location as your index file though.)
7. When you view the page, you will see an entry form where you can enter your search query and specify your results parameters from the drop-down menu.
8. Click submit and you will be re-directed to a page showing you the raw RDF results. Don't panic. This is right. You don't need to do anything with the raw feed. Simply copy the URL of this page from the address bar and paste it into your News Reader and subscribe to the feed.
9. That's it. It will update on the same schedule as your other subscriptions in your News Reader.

In order to run another search you just need to open up the ebay.php page again with your browser and submit a new search query. I haven't played with this enough to know if this will overwrite the first search yet or not. Still need to experiment with this. Also, I noticed already that if you select "Newly Listed" from the drop-down menu, it returns a feed that shows an Ending Date which is actually the listing date. "Ending First" seems to provide the best results for me.