I created http://home.nibzy.com/ or http://nibzy.com - basically bookmarks to all my favorite sites and then some to site with optimized mobile. Check it out and set it to your homepage if you like it. Heres a plain text version also - http://home.nibzy.com/plain (loads slightly faster)
Only if you can subscribe to RSS. There's nothing else you can do about normal sites without a mobile version. Were you just pinch-to-zooming? You can zoom the page directly on the content just by double tapping the screen, in case you didn't know. It works pretty well usually.