Yard Sale Treasure Map Counts the Paces to Your Local Hoard

It's a common scene: Saturday comes around and you feel like picking up some cheap used home items, browsing some street-side fashions, or digging through a crate of old books. The place you want to go is, of course, a local yard sale. But how do you know where the sales are? Paper signs on telephone poles are great, until it rains and the text blurs, or the wind turns them into a litter problem. Unless you happen to walk or drive by, you'll never know there's a great sale just down the block. Now, there's a geeky solution for yard sale power shoppers.

The Yard Sale Treasure Map mines Craigslist for data on local yard sales and then presents them to you in a convenient map. You can even search by item, delete the sales that don't interest you, and print out directions for the most direct driving route between sales.

This is convenient, for sure, but it also helps you save energy and keep still-valuable items from the landfill.

It's kind of like a geeky update to the Pirate's treasure map.

Shop Local, Join a Community, Become a Locallectual

Cruising yard sales is fun and a great way to find items to reuse but sometimes, you need to buy something new. Whether it's food or a unique piece of furniture, there are just some things that don't get reused. Just because you have to buy new, however, doesn't mean you don't care where it comes from.

This is where Locallectual can help. The website is working to become a comprehensive database of local producers for communities across the country. The selection for your area may be limited at the moment but, and this is the best part, you can help make it better.

Locallectual is maintained by the community, kind of like a Wikipedia for shopping locally. If you know a great craftsman or producer not in the database, simply sign in and add the info yourself. The more people contribute, the more useful the tool will become.