cormanaz has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Good day Bros. I am having an odd problem with a script I wrote to collect and aggregate RSS feeds from local news stations. Here is the script: 
#!/usr/bin/perl
#use strict;
$| = 1;
use Storable qw(nstore retrieve);
use XML::FeedPP;
use Date::Manip;
use LWP::UserAgent;
Date_Init("TZ=MST");
my $feeddate = UnixDate("now","%a, %e %b %Y %H:%M:%S %z");
my @feeds = qw (
http://fox-obfeeds.endplay.com/feeds/rssFeed?obfType=RSS_FEED&siteId=2
+00017
http://www.kpho.com/category/216452/kpho-newstream?clienttype=rss
http://www.kpho.com/category/210050/5-investigates?clienttype=rss
http://scrippsobfeeds.endplay.com/content-syndication-portlet/feedServ
+let?obfType=RSS_FEED&siteId=10008&categoryId=20413
http://scrippsobfeeds.endplay.com/content-syndication-portlet/feedServ
+let?obfType=RSS_FEED&siteId=10008&categoryId=20423
http://scrippsobfeeds.endplay.com/content-syndication-portlet/feedServ
+let?obfType=RSS_FEED&siteId=10008&categoryId=10001
http://scrippsobfeeds.endplay.com/content-syndication-portlet/feedServ
+let?obfType=RSS_FEED&siteId=10008&categoryId=20412
http://scrippsobfeeds.endplay.com/content-syndication-portlet/feedServ
+let?obfType=RSS_FEED&siteId=10008&categoryId=20001
http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/index.rss
);
my $dryheat = XML::FeedPP::RSS->new();
$dryheat->title("Dryheat Phoenix News");
$dryheat->description("Aggregated News from Various Phoenix Sources");
$dryheat->pubDate($feeddate);
my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new();
my $ctr = 0;
print "Getting feeds.\n";
foreach my $f (@feeds) {
    $ctr++;
    my $response = $ua->get($f);
    if ($response->is_success) {
        my $feed;
        eval {$feed = XML::FeedPP->new($response->content, -type => 's
+tring'); };
        if ($feed) {
            $dryheat->merge($feed);
        }
        print "\tOK $f\n";
    }
    else {
        print "\tResponse failed: $f ",$response->status_line,"\n";
    }
}
$dryheat->normalize();
open(OUT,">dryheat-rss.htm") or die "Can't open output: $!";
print OUT '<html><head><link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="dr
+yheat.css"><title>Dryheat Phoenix Local News</title></head><body>';
foreach my $item (@{$dryheat->{rss}->{channel}->{item}}) {
    my $category = $item->{category};
    if (ref($category) eq 'HASH') {
        $category = $category->{'#text'};
        my $foo = 'bar';
    }
    elsif (ref($category) eq 'ARRAY') {
        my $foo = 'bar';
        $category = $category->[0]->{'#text'};
    }
    unless ($category) {
        $category = 'News';
    }
    my $link = $item->{link};
    my $description = $item->{description};
    $description =~ s/\<\/?p\>//;
    if ($description !~ /SL Advert/) {    
        my $title = $item->{title};
        my $media;
        if ($item->{'media:content'}) {
            eval {$media = $item->{'media:content'}->{'-url'}};
        }
        my $source = $item->{source}->{'#text'};
        my $date = UnixDate(ParseDate($item->{pubDate}),'%A %i:%m %p')
+;
        
        print OUT '<div class="item-content">';
        if ($media) {
            print OUT "<img class=\"pic\" src=\"$media\">";
        }    
        my @header;
        if ($category) {
            push(@header,$category);
        }
        push (@header,$date);
        if ($source) {
            push(@header,"\($source\)");
        }
        print OUT '<p class="header">',join(" - ",@header),"</p>\n";
        print OUT "<p class=\"link\"><a href=\"$link\">$title</a></p>\
+n";
        print OUT "<p class=\"desc\">$description</p></div>\n";
    }
}
print OUT '</body></html>';
close OUT;
print "Done.\n";

[download]
When I run this, some of the sources return results and some do not, in random fashion on different days. When they don't, I get status_line responses of either 500 Can't connect or 500 Server closed connection without sending any data back.

The odd thing is that when I put the feed URLs into a browser right after running the script, they invariably return results. I suppose it's possible that these sources are blocking crawlers somehow, but I don't know why anyplace would do that with an RSS feed. Also this doesn't explain why they would work sometimes and not other times.

Anyone know what could be going on here or how I can debug?

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