I use the rss/2.0 or simple-rss gems to locally access the feed url-----http://sports.espn.go.com /espn/rss/news.The code is like following:
Hi,
Refer to this post!
http://sumanthtechsavvy.blogspot.com/2008/08/ror-course-rss-makerparser.html
and you can download the pdf for reference