How to Get started with RSS on your iPhone

Create an account

Open Feedly on your iPhone and tap Create Your Feedly. Sign in using whichever mechanism you prefer – although you may think it best to use Continue with Feedly and have a separate username and password for this service.

Find a source

Once you’ve created your account, Feedly’s sidebar will open, inviting you to ‘add your first source’ from which to retrieve news. Tap that button to use Feedly’s search feature. Type in the name of a website you’d like to read.

View a feed

Some sources will offer more than one feed. For now, choose whichever appeals most. Feedly will display the most recent article first, which you can tap to read. Alternatively, swipe upwards to see a list of other recent articles.

Subscribe to a feed

Tap the + icon to subscribe to the feed. Thereafter, you’ll see a cog icon, which is used to access the settings for that specific feed. Using this, you can adjust the way the feed is displayed, and also reorder its stories.

Edit your subscriptions

Head back to Feedly’s sidebar. Now you’ve added a source, you’ll see loads more options (including Read Later). Tap Add Content to add more feeds, or Edit Content to prune them.

Sync your feeds

Once your feeds have synced with Reeder, you’ll be able to read them as normal. In the feeds list, tap + to add a new feed. In a feed, the ‘•’ at the bottom marks items as read. Any changes are synced to your account.

Read a story

Tap a story to read it. For feeds that include full articles, you’ll see the article’s text and images minus website cruft, like in Safari’s Reader feature. For feeds that provide synopses, tap titles to read articles in Feedly’s built-in browser.

Fine-tune Feedly

Once you’re familiar with Feedly, fine-tune its interface to your liking by delving into the app’s settings. You can switch to other sharing and saving tools, the theme and fonts, and also gestural controls for saving and switching articles.

Bypass synopses

One advantage of using Reeder is in how it deals with synopses-only feeds. Tap the ‘M’ at the top of the screen and it attempts to load the article’s content. This doesn’t always work, but when it does it saves you a trip to Safari.

Save a story

When reading a story, tap the bookmark icon to add it to your ‘Read Later’ list (feeds are typically purged after 30 days). You can also send it to other services by tapping the ellipsis (…) and choosing accordingly.

Start using Reeder

Although Feedly is an app, it’s also a service, meaning you can connect your account to other RSS readers, such as Reeder 3 ($4.99, bit.ly/redr3). On Reeder’s Accounts screen, tap +, then Feedly, and enter your account details.

Adjust settings

Reeder also offers a quick way to customize its appearance – tap the ‘AA’ button at the top right and you can quickly adjust color scheme, text size and spacing, and the typeface used, if you’re not keen on the defaults.