First off, I've never gotten widgetized (just to lazy to learn something new I guess) so I can't comment on that.
Your biggest problem doing this is that adult feeds don't seem to follow any type of standard. Some of them put the whole post in the <item description> area. Some put a post synopsis in that area and put the post information in the <content:encode> area, some simply put the post in the <content:encode> area and no description and some put all the post information in both area's. I'm not even going to talk about what they do with some of the other area's of the feed...it can be crazy!
My preference is the second of the four as it give me the most flexability with the feed.
I use the free version of
RSS2HTML for doing this kind of thing. Either that or I do have some niche RSS aggregators that will give me a java script output.
RSS2HTML is the only program I've found that lets me decide which parts of the feed I want to use and lets me format them the way I want to.
I also like the
Simple Pie plug-in for WordPress. It is configurable but does not read the <content:encode> part of a RSS feed.
Actually I don't think most of the WP plugins will read the <content:encode> part of a feed.