So Google finally lit a fire under me. I've had "migrate off Reader" sitting on a sticky note on my monitor since the middle of March and I only actually did it this weekend, which means I've got about ten weeks left before the July 1st shutdown and I used up five of them doing absolutely nothing about it. Typical.
If you somehow missed it: Google announced in March that Reader is getting killed off as part of their spring cleaning, and unless something changes (it won't, don't get your hopes up) it goes dark on July 1st. I've used Reader every single morning with coffee for something like six years. Longer than I've had this blog, actually. So this weekend I sat down and actually did the export, and since a couple of people asked me on Twitter how I did mine, here's the actual process.
Step one: get your data out while you still can
Don't wait until June. Go to Google Takeout (takeout.google.com), pick Reader from the list of products, and it'll bundle up your subscriptions, starred items, shared items, and notes into a zip file. Takes maybe two minutes depending on how many feeds you're hoarding. I had 214 subscriptions, which sounds like a lot until you realize maybe 30 of them still actually post anything.
Inside that zip is a file called subscriptions.xml — that's your OPML file, the actual portable list of every feed you follow. That's the file that matters. Everything else in there (the starred items JSON, the notes) is nice to have but honestly I didn't bother doing anything with mine.
Step two: pick where you're going
I went with Feedly, mostly because it was the one that already had a "point this at your Reader account and we'll just grab everything automatically" option before Google even shuts the API off, so I didn't even need the OPML file in the end, but I still kept it as a backup because I don't trust any of these services not to have a rough first month. NewsBlur is the other one everyone keeps mentioning, and I know a few people who switched there and like it, but their servers got absolutely hammered right after the Reader announcement and I remember reading that new signups were literally waitlisted for a while. Feedly seemed like the safer bet for not fighting with a service on day one.
Setup was genuinely painless. Log in with your Google account, grant it read access, wait about ninety seconds while it syncs your entire subscription list and read/unread state, done. It even pulled over my folder structure, which I did not expect and was pretty happy about.
The part nobody tells you
The interface is different enough that it's going to bug you for a week or two no matter which one you pick. Feedly defaults to this magazine-style card view with big thumbnails, which looks nice on a laptop but is not how I read feeds. I want a plain list, I want to hit "j" to go to the next item, I want zero images loading unless I click through. Took me a few minutes digging through settings to find the "Title Only" view, but it's in there. If you're a keyboard-shortcut person like I am, go check their shortcuts list before you get frustrated and assume they don't exist.
One thing I'll say as a small complaint: none of these replacements have quite matched Reader's search. I used to be able to search across everything I'd ever starred going back years, and that was genuinely useful for finding an article I half-remembered. Feedly's search is fine for recent stuff but it's not the same.
Unrelated tangent, but while I was at the AT&T store on Friday picking up a spare charger I got roped into a demo of the HTC First, the phone with Facebook Home baked into it that just came out last week for $99. The guy doing the demo was clearly reciting a script and even he didn't seem that into it. Home is basically just your Facebook feed as your lock screen and home screen, and I get why Facebook wants that real estate, but I can't imagine wanting my phone to open into someone's vacation photos every single time. Not related to the Reader stuff at all, just funny timing that I noticed it the same week I was busy backing up years of RSS habits onto somebody else's server.
Anyway. If you're one of the people still putting this off: don't be me. Export your OPML now, pick a reader, and give yourself time to get annoyed at the new interface before the old one actually disappears.