talk minus action = zero

To go along with this post, I finished the first working version of my pidgin-identica-status plugin today. It pulls an RSS feed from identi.ca, and sets the latest entry as your status in Pidgin.
It feels like a hack to me; the Perl API for Pidgin is poorly documented. I set up a Google Code project for it, and would welcome contributors to clean up the code, ad functionality, etc...
http://code.google.com/p/pidgin-identica-status/

I'm trying to write a plugin for the Pidgin IM client in Perl that would take your latest post to http://identi.ca from an RSS feed and set it as your Pidgin status message. However the Perl API for Pidgin is poorly documented and I'm having trouble. I based a lot of it on the pidgintwitter-plugin.

I'm not sure what's going on exactly though I suspect I'm not passing the URL correctly to the the parsing subroutine.
Any help would be appreciated.

( code behind the cut )