using sessions allows us to override the user-agent reliably
everywhere.
our pattern is less than ideal, however: we use a global session
whereas we should probably create a FeedFetcher class. our approach
currently makes it clunky to expose the global session, as we can see
in the wayback plugin.
we switch to the betamax plugin as its configuration is slightly
easier to use: we can have a global toggle in conftest.py and use
pytest fixtures for tests that require them (and only those, so we can
bypass them easily).
this, in turn, means we completely eliminate any potential network
interactions during tests by committing the "cassettes", the recorded
request results.
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