You want to create an RSS (Rich Site Summary) file, or read one produced by another application. Handling RSS can be a difficult problem because of multiple incompatible specs calling themselves RSS, the generall looseness of the format, and issues with escaping and encoding content properly. RSS is a case study in how difficult it is to produce valid XML, partly because RSS traditionally includes fragments of HTML, which is marked up text, but not necessarily valid XML.
Let's stipulate that regardless of the RSS format, there's only a few things we're actually interested in: we want to come up with a list of items, where each item contains a date, a URL for the item, a description, and optionally, a title. We'll use David van Horn's script for scraping the word-a-day RSS Feed from wordsmith.org.
RSS