i agree the repetition isnt great, but i'd rather wait on refatoring this. the reason is because i'm searching for a suitable testing framework that can "record" and "playback" various HTTP interactions for tests. [such libraries](https://github.com/vcr/vcr) exist for other languages and work great at solving this scenario. i've got some more investigation to do but it seems like [Betamax](http://freeside.co/betamax/) would be a good solution. now tracking this with issue #31