Nice article and the minimalist nature of LWP::Simple is really in the spirit of Perl (IMO). It also has a number of very handy features like being able to save a webpage to directly to a file... really useful for retrieving the biological data files that form the basis of my work (as they are stored as plain text).

With regards to exporting the user agent from LWP::Simple this is always a good idea. However it becomes essential (in that you need a ua of some kind and it would be silly to create another ;D) if you are behind a firewall. In my post Incase You Need to Use a Proxy with LWP I have included some code snippets to show how I used LWP::Simple from behind a firewall. This may be necessary for many who are stuck behind a corporate/instiutions firewall.

Hope that adds to the material. Arun