ruby Simple RSS Parsing (See related posts)

def fetch_rss_items(url, max_items = nil)
%w{open-uri rss/0.9 rss/1.0 rss/2.0 rss/parser}.each do |lib|
require(lib)
end
rss = RSS::Parser.parse(open(url).read)
rss.items[0...(max_items ? max_items : rss.items.length)]
end

items = fetch_rss_items('http://www.digg.com/rss/index.xml', 5)
items.collect { |item| item.title }
=> ["Understanding AJAX - A Beginner's Guide",
"Anti-cancer Compound In Beer", ...]