python scrapy crawler with append() issue - python-2.7

Question

I took this example from scrapy.org. It worked fine until I tried to save everything in an items object. The items.append(item) is apparently invalid syntax, but all other examples on this website have the same assignment.
from scrapy.spider import BaseSpider
from scrapy.selector import HtmlXPathSelector
from tutorial.items import DmozItem
class DmozSpider(BaseSpider):
name = "dmoz"
allowed_domains = ["dmoz.org"]
start_urls = [
"http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/Python/Books/",
"http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/Python/Resources/"
]
def parse(self, response):
hxs = HtmlXPathSelector(response)
sites = hxs.select('//ul/li')
items = []
for site in sites:
item = DmozItem()
item['title'] = site.select('a/text()').extract()
item['link'] = site.select('a/#href').extract()
item['desc'] = site.select('text()').extract()
items.append(item)
return items
Error is:
computerito#computerito-the-great ~/SHITSHOW/tutorial $ scrapy crawl dmoz
2015-03-10 22:00:40-0700 [scrapy] INFO: Scrapy 0.14.4 started (bot: tutorial)
2015-03-10 22:00:40-0700 [scrapy] DEBUG: Enabled extensions: LogStats, TelnetConsole, CloseSpider, WebService, CoreStats, MemoryUsage, SpiderState
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/bin/scrapy", line 4, in <module>
execute()
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/scrapy/cmdline.py", line 132, in execute
_run_print_help(parser, _run_command, cmd, args, opts)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/scrapy/cmdline.py", line 97, in _run_print_help
func(*a, **kw)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/scrapy/cmdline.py", line 139, in _run_command
cmd.run(args, opts)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/scrapy/commands/crawl.py", line 43, in run
spider = self.crawler.spiders.create(spname, **opts.spargs)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/scrapy/command.py", line 34, in crawler
self._crawler.configure()
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/scrapy/crawler.py", line 36, in configure
self.spiders = spman_cls.from_crawler(self)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/scrapy/spidermanager.py", line 37, in from_crawler
return cls.from_settings(crawler.settings)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/scrapy/spidermanager.py", line 33, in from_settings
return cls(settings.getlist('SPIDER_MODULES'))
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/scrapy/spidermanager.py", line 23, in __init__
for module in walk_modules(name):
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/scrapy/utils/misc.py", line 65, in walk_modules
submod = __import__(fullpath, {}, {}, [''])
File "/home/computerito/SHITSHOW/tutorial/tutorial/spiders/dmoz_spider.py", line 25
items.append(item)
^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax