Yes, I know this is a complete re-factor, but this would be very nice.

Basically, what I would like to see (and I know some others would), would be
straw running either a daemon or an applet that actually did all the polling and
parsing. This would allow straw to get information without the viewer running.

Then have a viewer that would just basically parse the DB and get the
information and update as updates happen in the background.

I thought of this after someone mentioned it on irc the other day and thought it
sounded like a valid idea. I know I keep straw running all the time to make sure
some of the feeds that update a ton (like freshmeat) don't get data slipped by
me. If I could just be running a daemon, I would know it was always polling.