title: Scrapy CrawlSpider doesn't crawl the first landing page
body: <p>I am new to Scrapy and I am working on a scraping exercise and I am using the CrawlSpider.
  Although the Scrapy framework works beautifully and it follows the relevant links, I can't seem to make the CrawlSpider to scrape the very first link (the home page / landing page). Instead it goes directly to scrape the links determined by the rule but doesn't scrape the landing page on which the links are. I don't know how to fix this since it is not recommended to overwrite the parse method for a CrawlSpider. Modifying follow=True/False also doesn't yield any good results. Here is the snippet of code:</p>
  
  <pre><code>class DownloadSpider(CrawlSpider):
      name = 'downloader'
      allowed_domains = ['bnt-chemicals.de']
      start_urls = [
          "http://www.bnt-chemicals.de"        
          ]
      rules = (   
          Rule(SgmlLinkExtractor(aloow='prod'), callback='parse_item', follow=True),
          )
      fname = 1
  
      def parse_item(self, response):
          open(str(self.fname)+ '.txt', 'a').write(response.url)
          open(str(self.fname)+ '.txt', 'a').write(','+ str(response.meta['depth']))
          open(str(self.fname)+ '.txt', 'a').write('\n')
          open(str(self.fname)+ '.txt', 'a').write(response.body)
          open(str(self.fname)+ '.txt', 'a').write('\n')
          self.fname = self.fname + 1
  </code></pre>