So Google Reader dies in five weeks. July 1st, if you haven't been paying attention (and if you haven't, where have you been since March?). I've put off actually doing anything about it for two months now, the way you put off a dentist appointment, and this past weekend I finally sat down and moved everything over. Figured I'd write down what I did in case anyone else has been putting it off too.
I've been on Reader since sometime in 2009. Never bothered counting my subscriptions until I had to export them, and it turns out I had 214 feeds, a bunch of which haven't posted anything since 2011 and probably belong to blogs whose owners forgot they exist. Cleaning that up alone took longer than the actual migration.
The export part is easy. Google Takeout will give you an OPML file of everything in about thirty seconds — go to takeout.google.com, pick Reader, download the zip, there's your subscriptions.xml sitting right in there along with your starred items and notes. That part Google actually did well, which I wasn't expecting given how little effort they've put into Reader the last couple years.
The harder part is picking where to land. I tried three things this weekend:
Feedly is the one everyone's talking about, and for good reason: they apparently added something like three million users in the weeks right after the shutdown announcement in March, and they've been building out their own backend (they're calling it Normandy) so they're not stuck depending on Google's API once it goes away. Import was one click, keyboard shortcuts are close enough to Reader's that muscle memory mostly works, and the mobile app doesn't feel like an afterthought. My complaint: the default view is this magazine-tile layout that I hate, all big thumbnails and whitespace, like it's trying to be Flipboard. You can switch to a plain list in settings and I'd recommend doing that immediately, but it bugs me that it's not the default for people coming from something as spartan as Reader.
The Old Reader is basically Reader with a different logo, which is exactly what some of us wanted. No fancy layout options, no cards, just a list of unread items and a next button. It got so popular after the Reader announcement that the two guys running it had to shut off new signups for a while because their servers couldn't take it — I actually got stuck in a waitlist queue for about a week before I could even test it. If you liked old Reader for being boring and functional, this is your move.
NewsBlur I only poked at for twenty minutes. It's got this "intelligence trainer" thing where you train it on which sites and even which authors you like, which is neat in theory, but I didn't want to spend an evening teaching software my opinions when I could just be reading things. Might revisit it later.
I ended up on Feedly, mostly because of the mobile app, though I'm not thrilled about it. There's apparently something coming from Digg too. They announced back in March they were building their own reader, no launch date yet as far as I know, so that's one to watch if you're not in a rush.
One thing nobody mentions: your starred items don't come along cleanly no matter which service you pick. I had almost four years of stuff starred in Reader, recipes and articles I meant to go back to, and none of the three importers pulled that history over in any usable way. The OPML gets your subscriptions, not your archive. If you care about that stuff, go export your starred items separately from Takeout now, because once July 1st hits, it's just gone.
Anyway. Do it this week rather than the last week of June like a normal procrastinator would. The whole thing took me under an hour once I actually started, which is the annoying part: I could've done this back in March and saved myself two months of a nagging feeling every time I opened Reader and it worked fine, like nothing was wrong, like it wasn't already dead.