Isn't the Perl advent calendar cool ? One of the entries pointed to an article on O'Reilly.net about hacking some RSS spiders, which is what DarkChannels exactly is. It mentions the Perl modules Template::Extract and XML::RSS::Parser::Lite, which you can use to create your own RSS agregator. I certainly recommend Template::Extract, which is very usefull if you have complex datafiles from which you have to get your information.

Yesterday evening, I rewrote DarkChannels completely in Perl, so I could finally ditch the crappy shellscript I used to fetch the RSS feeds. So for now, DarkChannels 0.2 is just the same car, but with a different - and better - engine. Version 0.3 is already being coded, and will contain more functional enhancements.