I spent about ninety minutes last night doing something I've been putting off for almost a month: actually migrating my RSS feeds out of Google Reader. Not because it's dead yet — it's still limping along fine, still syncs, still shows unread counts, but because Google told everyone back in March that they're pulling the plug on July 1st, and I finally got tired of the little countdown anxiety sitting in the back of my head every time I opened it.
I ended up on Feedly, mostly because everyone else seems to have landed there too. Their "we got a million new users in 48 hours after the Reader announcement" number was floating around a few weeks ago and honestly it shows. The service feels a little more polished than it did when I poked at it last year, like they knew this was coming and quietly got their act together.
Here's roughly what I did, in case anyone else is stalling like I was:
Exporting from Reader first Go to Google Takeout, grab the Reader archive, and it spits out an OPML file with every subscription and every folder structure intact. Takes about two minutes. I had 134 feeds in there, which is honestly a little embarrassing, I don't think I've actually read half of them in months, I just never bothered unsubscribing.
Importing into Feedly You don't even need the OPML file if you sign in with the same Google account, Feedly just reads your existing Reader subscriptions directly and rebuilds the folders for you. It took maybe thirty seconds to pull everything over, categories and all, which was a nice surprise. I'd braced myself for some janky manual re-sorting process and it just didn't happen.
The view stuff Feedly defaults to this "Magazine" view with big thumbnail tiles, which I did not like at all, feels like it's trying to be a tablet app that got stuffed into a browser. I switched everything to Title Only within about five minutes. If you're used to Reader's plain list, go into the settings and change it, you'll be much happier. There's also a "Normal" view in between that shows a bit of the snippet text, which is closer to what I actually want but I've been living in Title Only for years now and I'm not about to change habits three months before I have to.
Keyboard shortcuts carried over decently: j and k still move you down and up the list, s still stars something, though I had to relearn a couple since Feedly maps a few keys differently (a marks all as read instead of Reader's shift-a, which tripped me up twice already and marked a folder I hadn't finished reading).
One thing I'll say: Feedly is not a Reader clone, and if you go in expecting pixel parity you'll be annoyed. It's closer, but there's a "Today" section pinned at the top that I keep accidentally clicking into, and no real equivalent of Reader's old "trends" stats page that I used to check way too often. I miss it a little. Not enough to not switch, but enough to complain about it here.
Small aside, unrelated to any of this: I'm already sick of "Home" branding this week, before the phone with it has even shipped. Everyone's phone dropped what they were doing Thursday to cover the Facebook event, and my feeds (the same 134 feeds I just spent all night reorganizing) got absolutely buried in Facebook Home takes for about three days straight. I get that it's a real shift in how they want Android to look, launcher replacing the launcher and all that, but I'm not swapping my home screen for a stream of a friend's lunch photos, and I don't think I'm alone in that. We'll see if anyone's still using it in six months.
Anyway. If you've been putting off the Reader move like I was, don't wait until June, do it on a slow evening when you can actually sit with the folder structure and prune some dead feeds while you're at it. I cut mine down to 98 in the process, which felt good. There were at least a dozen blogs in there that hadn't posted since 2011 and I have no idea why I never noticed.
Back to catching up on two weeks of unread posts now. Apparently ignoring your RSS reader for a fortnight is a real mistake.