Well, she was saying it was giving that error, that error means the file isn't being created (by going to the forum and checking it wasn't being created) so the troubleshooting was to ensure that the directory is writeable so the file can be created and overwritten.
As for syndicating RSS feeds, there are plenty of free RSS parsers online, your google search criteria would vary based on how you have content on your site... If you're using PHP (which would be ideal) you'd simply search "PHP RSS Parser" (for ASP you'd do "ASP RSS Parser"). With any luck you aren't using plain .html pages as they're not parsed as PHP files by default.
