Poor man's RSS for older iOS devices
One of the consequences of Google Reader shutting down is that owners of older iPhones are left without clients to remain up-to-date with their feeds. (I admit I'm making a big assumption here: if you know of an iOS client that doesn't depend on a Google Reader account and still works under iOS 3.x and 4.x, please let me know.)
Earlier today I made a little discovery that inspired me to write this brief suggestion. I was browsing my Safari bookmarks on my (dying) iPhone 3G with iOS 4.2.1, and discovered that Safari still parses feed URLs correctly because apparently Apple's reader.mac.com service still works.
So, if you still have and use older iOS devices like an iPhone 3G or the first generations of iPod touch models, and you want to be able to take a look at least at the RSS feeds that are most important to you, you could access each website's feed URL in Safari, create a bookmark of that URL, and collect all the bookmarked feeds in a folder.
It's not the most straightforward process, I know. If a website doesn't have an explicit link to its feed, you may need to explore a bit to find that link. (I've used NetNewsWire on my Macs to discover certain feed URLs, for example.) But the result is better than nothing — once you've assembled your bookmarked feed URLs in a folder in Safari, you access that folder and read your feeds inside the browser. And it works even on a device as old as the first-generation iPod touch with iOS 3.1.3.
Fig. 1: My folder of bookmarked feeds.
Fig. 2: How a list of articles looks inside Safari.
