An easy way to read an RSS feed with PHP is to use the MagpieRSS library. This provides a simple API to read an RSS feed, and elegantly deal with the issues of timeouts and caching.

It’s as simple as:

require('rss_fetch.inc');
$rss = fetch_rss($url);
echo "Site: ", $rss->channel['title'], "<br>
";
foreach ($rss->items as $item ) {
	$title = $item[title];
	$url   = $item[link];
	echo "<a href=$url>$title</a></li><br>
";
}

More information is available from the MagpieRSS website