[StavrosK]

I started using HttpClient, but I saw a blog post that said that HttpURLConnection should be used by all new apps, so I went with that. I can't tell you about checked vs unchecked exceptions, as I just found out about them a minute ago.

In the end, I used this excellent library: http://loopj.com/android-async-http/

It's asynchronous, but it still required the work to be done in an AsyncTask, which is odd to me (why spawn a thread to spawn another thread?), but it wouldn't work in the main thread, and Android was good enough to tell me about it.

I'm glad that I'm not doing anything wrong, but I'm also sad because I was hoping I was doing something wrong. Thanks for your reply!