[Doctor_Fegg]

I'd suggest going with mechanize from the off - not just, as the article says, "[when] the site you’re scraping requires you to login first, for those instances I recommend looking into mechanize".

Mechanize allows you to write clean, efficient scraper code without all the boilerplate. It's the nicest scraping solution I've yet encountered.

[hecticjeff]

I agree that mechanize is an excellent scraping solution, but for something really basic like this where we're not clicking links or submitting forms it seemed like a bit of an overkill :)

[Doctor_Fegg]

Each to their own, but I find the Mechanize syntax much easier even for simple scraping work. You can use CSS selectors as per the example, or XPath should you want to get more complex.