You have to realize that my original code was not written for simplicity by using modules; it was designed to make the smallest possible .exe file when compiled. So I did away with LWP::Simple and used Socket because it saved 200K. I don't know how many extra kilobytes would have been used by the XML:RSS module, but I'm betting it's a lot more than are used by 3 or 4 lines worth of regexs.