URI::Fetch is a new perl module from ben trott (of movable type renown) that does compression, ETag, and last-modified handling when retrieving web resources. the lazyweb delivers again.

speaking of that, i found i had to do one additional thing to my php code that fetches pages because of a non-existent workaround for server bugs in the version of curl i’m using. so when blo.gs fetches a page to verify a ping and gets a particular compression-related error, it goes back out and requests the page again without compression.