Jim -- Thanks for the link. That definetly helps point me in the correct direction. I've been looking over the code to get an idea of how it's structured and how python works. So far it seems pretty straight forward.
I did notice one thing that I'll probably work on, but just in case I can't figure it out, I'll let you know too

It doesn't appear you are getting urls using gzip or deflate from the server. I have a similar progam I wrote late last year that DL's any story on FF.net over 25k words and matching a few other criteria automatically. When I started using gzip over just normal requests it started running at least an order of magnitude faster.
I did manage to find a few pages on how to do this in python, but not with the method you are using to retireve urls. So I'll probably play around with that for a starter... something easy before I try to do a whole file myself.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3...-fetch-webpage
http://techknack.net/python-urllib2-handlers/
Anyways, thought I'd at least metion my previous experience with a progam doing something similar to this and the speed increase I got.
Looking forward to hopefully being about to eventually contribute to this already great plugin.
Mark