I was able to add authentication by subclassing LWP::UserAgent and overriding the get_basic_credentials() sub. I also had to switch from simple_request() to request() in order for that sub to be called automatically. I also had to turn off auto-redirects ($agent->requests_redirectable( [] );) so i can decide how i want to proceed when a redirect is returned.
The w3c has a few test pages allowing me to test out the authentication.
I'm now eval'ing any RSS data i get (eval { $rss->parse( $data ); };) so i can stop any malformed XML from being injected into the cache and buggering up the aggregator.
