If you're looking at writing a spider, the WWW::Robot module should get some airtime. I used it with great success a while back to slurp the contents of a rather large and complex zoo of static pages into a dynamic engine. Especially cool in my eyes because it uses HTML::Treebuilder, which I also happen to like.

perl -pe '"I lo*`+$^X$\"$]!$/"=~m%(.*)%s;$_=$1;y^`+*^e v^#$&V"+@( NO CARRIER'