in 2013, urllib2 is pretty low level and anachronistic

timeouts_with_urllib2.py

hard_timelimit = 30

def fetch(url, timelimit=10)
  old_timeout = socket.getdefaulttimeout()
  if old_timeout == 0:
    # we *never* want a hang-forever socket connections
    old_timeout = hard_timelimit
  socket.setdefaulttimeout(timelimit)
  # do shit with urllib2 (build a request with Accept headers, deal transient error retries, etc)
  # note that urlopen also takes a timeout param
  # ..
  # now that we're done and have a response to return, restore the timeout
  socket.setdefaulttimeout(old_timeout)
  return response