DRAKMA
Yesterday's blog mentioned trouble I'm having with cl-curl, my own package. A comment pointed me to DRAKMA, yet another Edi Weitz bequest to the lisp world. It is a native common lisp http client that handles the particular web site I am scraping data from, complete with password and cookies. It was very simple to rewrite my access functions to use DRAKMA, and it is able to retrieve all the data I wanted, no memory fault like cl-curl. So I will update the cl-curl project page to recommend DRAKMA.

It was a little unclear how to install DRAKMA; here is my condensed summary, on Debian:

1. sudo aptitude install cl-chunga cl-puri cl-flexi-streams
   
2. wget http://common-lisp.net/project/usocket/releases/usocket-0.3.2.tar.gz
   
3. wget http://common-lisp.net/project/cl-plus-ssl/download/cl+ssl-2007-03-10.tar.gz
   
4. wget http://weitz.de/files/drakma.tar.gz
   
5. tar zxvf usocket-0.3.2.tar.gz
   
6. tar zxvf cl+ssl-2007-03-10.tar.gz
   
7. tar zxvf drakma.tar.gz
   
8. clc-register-user-package usocket-0.3.2/usocket.asd
   
9. clc-register-user-package cl+ssl-2007-03-10/cl+ssl.asd
   
10. clc-register-user-package drakma-0.7.0/drakma.asd
    
11. ,l drakma (in slime)