Well, it turns out that I still had something messed up in my .htaccess file. I fixed that, but I still have the display problem.
To answer your question, a news aggregator is software to accumulate all your RSS feeds into a single place, and yes, it does parse the content for display. My feed from phpdig still isn't displaying correctly.
I just added a different feed to Awasu (my news aggregator). I notice the first news item displays all that HTML garbage but the other two in the list display okay (except for a > but that's a separate problem). Anyway, is it possible that the XML is incorrect?
Here is the latest RSS feed that I created.