Posting to Google Reader from the iPhone

I’ve recently started making use of Reeder for the iPhone and iPad. Its a great app for using Google Reader to sync items across the desktop, with one major flaw – a simple method of subscribing to feeds.

At present I can follow a bookmarklet which uses Javascript to discover the URL of the RSS document, and sends that address to Google Reader’s ‘add-new-feed’ URL. This works brilliantly on the desktop, but doesn’t degrade nicely for mobile. It uses full sized and custom UI controls which are a pain on a smaller screen device. There is a mobile friendly feed subscription page available, but it doesn’t seem to be accessible by Javascript.

More annoyingly, this bookmarklet is accessible outside of Reeder’s build in web-browser, meaning even using the jerry-rigged method above doesn’t work.

Solving this problem within MobileSafari is obviously an Apple issue, but a potential fix for Reeder would be to add a function which pastes a feed URL into Google Reader’s mobile subscription page from within the app. It would be a hack, but would be a very useful feature.