Touch the Elbow - Blogging the Civil War

Even though eBay has lots of neat ways to do searches (simple, advanced, random), I still search the same way I started some 10 years ago (and the same we suggest in our book). It's easy really, since the regiment often is called one of three different things, I do three searches with the “search title and description” box checked.



Now, I learned long ago that I could put quotation marks around "civil war" and "18th ma" and it would limit the responses. The problem is that it would keep me from getting many responses and I would get depressed that nothing came back. Even as strange as it seems, when nothing comes up, I get a bit depressed that my search is in vain

Keeping it wide open like this would bring back many different responses and some funny things I could bid on.. For example, every month or so I will get an auction on some Chinese statuary and of course always some sort of furniture from the 18th century that “Ma” owned but I never bid on them.

So when a good friend of mine suggested that I try doing an RSS feed, he had to remind me several times before I actually did it. I’ve got to say it’s pretty easy to set up, you do your search and then press the little RSS box, grab an http address and put it in your news reader.

Your newsreader shows all the auctions that you would see by going to eBay and searching yourself. As time goes by it refreshes and shows the new auctions and gets rid of the old ones. If you are looking for the simplest way to search eBay, this is it. Everything is right there for you and you don’t have to do anything to get it (once its set up).

But I don’t like it; it’s missing something and does not seem to be as much fun. It just seems to be, well, a list. After a week of trying it, I don’t even want to look at. It’s blah. I enjoy looking at each auction and entering its respective page, trying to think, do I want this and if I do, how am I going to win it. Instead, I have to go one at a time to see what the auction title is listed as and actually go into the auction page to get a real look at it. Too much work for me!

So, it looks like the RSS feed is a bust to me and I’ll go back to my old searching ways. I might go a little more advanced this time and combine the three versions of the state and the two versions of the unit’s number.

Nah, I’m an old dog and I don’t do new tricks.