The goal of this project is to automate the process of posting advertisements on craigslist.
- Use requests module to grab the landing page html
- Use bs4 to find all the links of the available local posting locations
- Clean up the link data using string replace (and regex if necessary)
- Make a separate list for the links and for the locations.
- Loop thru the locations list to find a zip code for each location on the list. (Use either requests or selenium web driver, NOT ahk/pmc or other basic automation software which are too finiky wrt page loading times) [I used selenium for practice, though requests may be better option, since you don't really need an actual web browser]
- Create a dataframe in pandas with each of the lists (location, link, zip) and set the index column as the location.
- Store the dataframe as a pickle file.
- Reload the pickle file some time later along with all the appropriate posting data (login info, ad content, etc.)
- Use selenium to navigate to a location's link then automate a series of clicks to post an ad to that particular location.
- Loop through multiple locations and email/password combinations to batch post.
- Renew ads automatically with selenium.