Here is a little code snippet which monkey-patch Feedalizer to let it grab web content through a HTTP proxy:

# HTTP proxy settings
HTTP_PROXY_HOST = "123.456.78.90"
HTTP_PROXY_PORT = 8080

# Calculate proxy URL
HTTP_PROXY_URL = "http://#{HTTP_PROXY_HOST}:#{HTTP_PROXY_PORT}"

# Monkey patch feedalizer to support page grabbing through a proxy
require 'feedalizer'
class Feedalizer
  # Backup original grab_page method
  alias_method :grab_page_orig, :grab_page
  # Define new grab_page() method with proxy support
  def grab_page(url)
    open(url, :proxy => HTTP_PROXY_URL) { |io| Hpricot(io) }
  end
end

This fix, written for a Ruby on Rails -based project, lay in the environment.rb file, but I wonder if this is the right place and the right way of doing it… Anyway, it works for me! :)

Update : A post from Matthew Higgins’ blog that answer my question above has just shown up in my feed aggregator. What’s he telling us? That I’m a naughty programmer :

Previous to 2.0, naughty developers pasted code at the bottom of environment.rb , and the config/initializer folder was a welcome convention to help organize this madness.

For your instance, the code in this post is extracted from an “old” (prior to RoR 2.0) project, thus explaining my naughtyness… ;)