So I finally did it. Twelve days before Google flips the switch on Reader, I moved my whole feed list over to Feedly, and I'm annoyed at myself for putting it off this long. If you're still sitting on this, stop reading Twitter complaints about it and just go do it tonight. It takes about fifteen minutes.
Quick recap for anyone who's been ignoring this the way I was: Google announced back in March that Reader dies July 1st. Full stop, no extension, no "actually we changed our minds." I kept telling myself I had plenty of time. I did not have plenty of time. I had a browser tab open with a couple hundred unread items sitting there mocking me until Sunday night when I actually sat down and dealt with it.
The export part is dead simple
Go into Google Reader settings, there's an "Import/Export" tab, hit "Export your subscriptions as an OPML file," and it just downloads. I don't know why I'd built this up in my head as some huge migration project. It's a text file with your feed URLs in it and that's it.
Feedly makes the import painless
I went with Feedly mostly because everyone I follow online had already jumped there back in March, right after the shutdown announcement, when their signup numbers apparently spiked so hard they had to scramble. They've spent the months since then publicly building something they call the Normandy project, basically their own backend so all the third-party apps that used to talk to Google's Reader API (Reeder, Press, that sort of thing) can just point at Feedly instead once Google's servers go dark. You sign in, drag your OPML file onto the import screen, and every folder and feed shows up exactly the way it was. Genuinely the easiest data migration I've done all year, and I say that as someone who lost an entire Saturday in April moving a client's WordPress install to new hosting.
The keyboard shortcuts aren't identical to Reader's but they're close enough that your fingers mostly know what to do. J and K still move you down and up through the list, S still stars a post. What I actually miss is Reader's plain, boring list view. Feedly defaults to this magazine-style layout with big thumbnails that I do not want, though there's a "Title Only" density option buried in the settings that gets you most of the way back to something sane.
One thing worth doing before you forget: if you use Instapaper or Pocket to save stuff for later, go check that the browser extension or bookmarklet you were using with Reader still fires correctly inside Feedly's interface. Mine didn't at first, turned out to be a stale bookmarklet pointing at an old URL structure, took me a minute to notice.
I know some people are holding out for other options instead of committing to Feedly. NewsBlur's been around for years and had its own moment back in March when the flood of new signups actually knocked its servers over for a couple days, which felt like a rough way to make a first impression on a wave of refugees. I hear Digg is building something too, but there's nothing to actually use yet, so that's a bet on a thing that doesn't exist. I'd rather migrate to something that works today than wait around for a promise.
Small tangent, nothing to do with RSS: I saw this morning that Microsoft is walking back the Xbox One always-online and used-game restrictions they announced at E3 a couple weeks ago. Good. I was fully prepared to just skip this console generation on principle, and honestly the fact that they only backed down after everyone lost their minds publicly doesn't inspire a ton of confidence about what they actually wanted to ship. Anyway.
If you haven't exported your OPML yet, do it this week, not next week. July 1st is coming whether you're ready or not, and unlike most software deadlines, this one is not going to slip.