So July 1st is coming up faster than I'd like to admit, and that's the day Google actually pulls the plug on Reader. I've been putting off dealing with this since March when they announced it, the way you put off a dentist appointment, and I finally spent Sunday afternoon actually moving my feeds somewhere else. Figured I'd write up what I did in case anyone else has been procrastinating just as hard.
First thing: export your data now, even if you're not ready to pick a new home for it yet. Go to Google Takeout, select Reader, and it'll spit out a zip with an OPML file (subscriptions.xml) plus your starred items and notes. Takes about two minutes. Do this even if you think you have weeks left, because I guarantee a decent chunk of people are going to wait until June 30th and Google's servers are going to have a bad day.
I tried three replacements this weekend. Here's where I landed.
Feedly is the one everyone's been pushing since March, and for good reason, it just works. You sign in with your Google account, it pulls your existing Reader subscriptions automatically (no OPML upload needed if you do it before the 1st), and the UI doesn't feel like it's trying to reinvent what a feed reader is for. They've also been building something called Project Normandy, basically a Reader-API-compatible backend, so that apps like Reeder and Press can keep talking to it after Google's servers go dark. That matters a lot to me because I read almost everything on my phone through Reeder and I was not looking forward to losing that app.
The Old Reader is the one that looks and feels the most like actual Google Reader, right down to the friends/sharing stuff that Google killed off back in 2011 (still bitter about that one, by the way, that was the feature that made Reader worth using as more than a glorified inbox). Problem is they got absolutely hammered with new signups back in March and had to close registration for a while to keep the lights on. It's back open now but it's clearly a small operation running on borrowed time and goodwill, and I'm a little nervous about putting all my eggs there.
NewsBlur is the odd one out, it's got this "intelligence" feature that trains on what you read and starts highlighting stories it thinks you'll like, which sounds gimmicky but I didn't hate it after a day. Samuel Clay (the guy who built it) has been posting these wild transparency updates about server load and signup numbers since the Reader news broke, which I respect even if half of it reads like a cry for help. Free tier caps you at 64 feeds though, which is nowhere near enough for me, so it's either pay $24/year or don't bother.
Worth mentioning Digg is apparently building their own reader too, supposed to land sometime before the July 1st deadline, but there's nothing to actually use yet so I can't tell you anything about it.
What I ended up doing: Feedly as my daily driver, with the OPML file also sitting in a folder on my desktop as a backup so I'm not locked into anything. Took maybe twenty minutes total once I stopped putting it off, most of which was spent re-sorting my folders because eight years of Reader had turned into a graveyard of feeds I don't read anymore. Cut my subscription list from something like 340 feeds down to 190 in the process, which honestly should've happened years ago regardless of Google forcing my hand.
The bigger thing I keep thinking about is how much of my reading habit was built on a product Google apparently decided wasn't worth the maintenance cost, and how little warning we actually got, three and a half months isn't nothing but it's not a lot either when you consider how many people run their entire information diet through this thing. I don't think RSS is dying, whatever the "RSS is dead" crowd keeps insisting on Twitter, but I do think this is the moment a lot of people are going to quietly stop reading blogs altogether because switching readers felt like too much friction. If you're one of the people still subscribed to this blog through Reader, do yourself a favor and get that export done this week. Don't be the person still refreshing a dead URL on July 2nd wondering where all your feeds went.