Finding a new apartment can be grueling: You search through listings, toss out the duds (as if that 1 room shanty could ever be considered a 1 bedroom house), make phone calls, call back, and schedule appointments, all in the hope that you can find and secure the perfect apartment.

I'm not one to brag, but I signed the lease on my new (perfect) apartment last Friday after only a week of searching, and I learned a lot along the way. If you're thinking about upgrading your space, I can't promise you your dream apartment, but I can show you a few tried-and-true methods for finding a great new place.

Craigslist is your best friend

If you're lucky enough to live in one of the ever-growing number of cities with an active Craigslist, this should be your first stop for apartment-hunting.

Since Craigslist allows you to subscribe to search-based RSS feeds, you can very easily and quickly set up a number of searches that you can track via your favorite RSS reader (I used Bloglines).

To set up a search-based feed, go to your friendly neighborhood Craigslist and click on Housing. Then enter your search term(s), rent limits, number of bedrooms, and whether you're looking for a pet friendly place. After you've entered all your criteria and hit Enter, go to the bottom of the page and copy the link from the RSS text at bottom of the page. Then just add the link to your feed reader.

Track a LOT of search terms

When you're setting up your Craigslist feeds, don't be stingy on the number of feed subscriptions. For my apartment hunt, for example, I was tracking over 20 different feeds in my apartment search folder. If you know where you want to live, go nuts - create a separate feed for every neighborhood name, nickname, and street name in your search area.

You may end up with a few irrelevant results if the street runs well outside of your search area, but those are easy to weed through, and it's better that you have a couple of extras than miss that one perfect listing. After all, the more terms you flag, the more likely you'll find that one apartment that may have slipped under the radar of your competition (okay, so it's not a competition, per se. but who hasn't felt the someone-might-snag-this-great-apartment-before-I-do anxiety?).

If you'd prefer not having 20-plus different feeds in your reader, you can aggregate the whole bunch of them with previously-mentioned RSS aggregator FeedBlendr .

FeedBlendr is a web based RSS feed aggregator that pulls all of your favorite RSS feeds into one… Read more Read more