Does anyone know and could you recommend me any links to any good, free, open-source, PHP-based script that can parse an RSS feed to HTML (and then I can edit the format of the appearance of that feed however I wish), by taking the title of a blog post and then taking a specified number of first characters from that post? If it's not open-source, at least it should be free and able to do what I specified above, ideally without any 'credit links' to the creator of the script, although I won't mind a minimally-intrusive mention of the creator's website.
yep. 1) magpie RSS 2) simplepie (simplepie.org) Have used both. Easy enough to work with. Simplepie has better documentation for newbies though. I embedded mine into a wiki. good luck