But if the page I want it on is not a .php page, then the .php translators would simply ignore it. Am I right?
Yes, non-php pages cannot serve php content unless you set apache (through the conf or .htaccess) to read php content through .htm/.html pages.
Well, the RSS feeds only work for forum data, check out my
http://home.undergroundnews.com/ page, I use rss feeds from several sites, using LastRSS; I only grab the username and title, but the same could really be done for content as well.