I think the Slashdot Headline Grabber is a good idea. I only have one question: why not using LWP to get the /. xml page? I think it's better, and using LWP it is possible to set up a proxy (very useful if you are beyond a firewall). I hacked your code a bit, and here are my suggestions:
use LWP;
use HTTP::Request::Common;
#
# ....
#
sub fetch_headlines {
    my @D;
    my $ua = new LWP::UserAgent;
    return 0 unless ($ua);
    $ua->proxy('http', 'http://myproxy.mynet.org:8080'); #set up your 
+proxy here
    my $url = "http://www.slashdot.org/slashdot.xml";    
    my $res = $ua->request(GET $url);
    if ($res->is_success) {    
        @D = split /\n/, $res->content;
    } else {
        return 0;
    }    
    my ($title, $url);
    for (@D) {
        $title = $1 if /\<title\>(.*)\<\/title\>/;
        $url = $1 if /\<url\>(.*)\<\/url\>/;
        if (/<\/story>/) { 
            $stories{$url} = $title;
            push(@keys, $url);
            $title = "";
            $url = "";
        }
    }
    return 1;
}

[download]

It may also be a good idea to use XML::DOM to parse the XML downloaded from /. but that is probably too much for the Headline Grabber: the for loop is quicker.
Any comment is highly appreciated.
marcos

In reply to RE: Slashdot Headline Grabber for Win32 by marcos
in thread Slashdot Headline Grabber for Win32 by httptech

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