GSN Info

Running your own garage sale program? Join the Garage Sale Network . The purpose of the garage sale network is to share garage sale data. By sharing data across various sites users can use which ever site they feel comfortable with. While having the added benefit of viewing all sales in their area from various sites at once.



With BitTorrent? download network in mind the Garage Sale Network as born in July, 2005. Each member site will provide a URL to their database in the format of either a CSV or XML file/page. These URLs will contain the data from the GSN and their own entry forms. This will allow for all member sites to be able to pull from each other building a complete database of all garage sale ads.

To stop spamers from using the data for malicious intent, each member is required to implement IP based security for their URLs. Once a GSN Member, the table below will open up to show the URLs, and IP addresses which are allowed to access the network.

Each GSN Member of the network is responsible for their own site and URLs. If you have any problems or questions contact the owner of the site or post your concerns in the Garage Sale Network Forum. Someone will address your issue.

The URL can be a link to a dynamic screen or static file. The preferred method is to use XML. XML has built-in validation to handle entries which formatting characters which might mess up a CSV file. However CSV is provided as I know not everyone knows how to deal with an XML file. (for tips on building xml check out the GSN Forum)



Q: How do we handle duplicates?

A: Bottom line it's up to each member to handle duplicates on their own site. The GSN is only a concept for transferring the date back and forth to sites. For the Garage Sale Organizer I have a primary key on Address(Street, TitleCase(Address), TitleCase(City), Province, Country) and Times(AddressID, Start_Date). This takes care of 95% of duplicates.

Q: When should I pull my updates?

A: I do the Garage Sale Organizer every night at 3:00 am EST. If your only pulling from me, best to do it after 3:00 am EST. If you pull from everyone on the network it doesn't matter, ads can be entered at anytime.

Q: What timezone is the data in?

A: All of them. Since we are keeping track of the city the times should be in the same timezone as the city. That way we don't have to worry about trying to convert timezones with the data.


Currently we are doing a regular expression pattern matching on various user inputted RSS and XML type feeds. This process is proving to be only about ~85% accurate. The problem is I haven't seen and manually adjusted the parser for every condition. Not to mention that there are thousands of ways to write addresses and dates.

For the last 2 years I've been slowly working on redesigning this engine and building my own geocoder. I'm at a stage now where I need training data to program an AI (Artificial Intelligence) type neural net to find these addresses and dates. I currently have ~700,000 ads saved, and for training date I need people to manually look at the ad, find the key pieces of information and submit it.

To help with the training data: http://gsn-admin.garagesaleorganizer.ca/ManualUpdate_Data.php

Use your GSO username and password to log in, or hit cancel to go to the user creation page

For more info

GSN Application

Fill out all the fields in the application and submit it. Use TDB if your extract urls are not finished yet. When you have them finished you can send them to me via osticket. Once your application is completed it will come to me for approval. After approval has been granted the table GSN Member page will open up and you can start using the network.