I recently watched a RailsCasts episode (http://railscasts.com/episodes/168-feed-parsing) on parsing and persisting RSS feeds using Feedzirra. It took a little setting up on Ubuntu because it relies on some libraries that aren't included with Ubuntu > 8.

The gem will fail right off the bat

gem sources -a http://gems.github.com # if you haven't already
gem install pauldix-feedzirra

apt-get install libcurl3
apt-get install libxml2 libxml2-dev
apt-get install libxslt1-dev

Then go ahead and

gem install pauldix-feedzirra

Here are some other useful resources http://github.com/pauldix/feedzirra/tree/master http://ruby.zigzo.com/2009/02/15/feedzirra-installation-errors/