i was getting an issue where sometimes the abcdigapi.py would crash with 'inable to parse json' or something.  the problem being at that instant, the real abc api didn't return us valid data, perhaps a 404?  not sure.  at any rate, moved to urllib2 because urllib gave us no easy way to parse the http return code.  with the new libary we get urllib2.code and if that's not 200 then we know there's an issue.  the http return code will be printed to the screen and it will keep hitting the real abc api until it gets 200 and then hopefully won't crash