Okay, this is starting to drive me a little bit nuts. I\'ve tried several xml/xpath libraries for Python, and can\'t figure out a simple way to get a stinkin\' \"title\" element
You probably just have to take into account the namespace of the document which you're dealing with.
I'd suggest looking up how to deal with namespaces in Amara:
http://www.xml3k.org/Amara/Manual#namespaces
Edit: Using your code snippet I made some edits. I don't know what version of Amara you're using but based on the docs I tried to accommodate it as much as possible:
def view(req, url):
req.content_type = 'text/plain'
ns = {u'f' : u'http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom',
u't' : u'http://purl.org/syndication/thread/1.0'}
doc = amara.parse(urlopen(url), prefixes=ns)
req.write(str(doc.xml_xpath(u'f:title')))