I'm not really a programmer, but after some struggling I managed to get rss2html.php working to pull in an RSS feed and display the first two items. I had to use a third-party aggregator (hosted elsewhere) to combine 4 or so RSS Feeds into one common feed, then gave this link to my page. It was working ok, though a little slow at times (I guess because the PHP has to execute before the res of the page will load). The biggest problem I then hit was that the third party aggregator went offline a few times over the course of a few days, which caused my site to return a 500 internal server error. I assume it timed out trying to load the feeds which it never found. I have now hooked the RSS into yahoo pipes as I figured it'd be more reliable. However, I still am a bit concerned that the same thing could happen again. What's the best/most reliable way to combine multiple RSS feeds and display the first two on a site? It has to be something I can style 100%, if it's a dropped in widget. My last thought was to pull the RSS on another page on the server, then use javascript to display the feed. I figured this way it wouldn't bomb out completely when the rss fails. I don't know if this is even possible though. Thanks very much for any help.
RSS2HTML has a caching feature that will speed it up (see RSS Cache) - http://www.feedforall.com/scripts-directory.htm