So Google Reader has been dead for five days now and I'm only just getting around to dealing with it, which tells you something about how much I actually used the thing versus how much I just left it open in a tab out of habit. It shut off for good on July 1st, a Monday, right around the time I was dealing with a router that kept dropping wifi every forty minutes (still haven't fixed that, it's a separate rant for a separate post). By the time I sat down Wednesday night to actually pick a replacement, half the internet had already made up its mind and moved on without me.
I had 214 feeds in there. I know because the export OPML file Google let you download told me so, right there in the filename summary when I opened it in a text editor to see what I was dealing with. A lot of them were dead. Blogs that stopped posting in 2011, one tech news site that got acquired and now just redirects to a domain squatter page, a webcomic the author quietly abandoned. Digital hoarding, basically, and Reader's shutdown forced me to actually look at the pile.
I tried three things before landing anywhere.
Feedly was the obvious first stop since everyone and their mother had already jumped ship there back in March when Google first announced Reader was getting the axe. The import was painless, drag the OPML in, done in about ninety seconds. But the app on my phone still feels like it's fighting me. There's this card-based view that I think is supposed to feel modern and magazine-y, and maybe on an iPad it does, but on my phone it just means more scrolling to see less text. I want a list. I want to scan headlines fast, the way Reader let you do with j and k on the keyboard, and Feedly's keyboard shortcuts (they do have them, to be fair) never quite matched the muscle memory.
Digg Reader launched publicly on June 26th, just days before the shutdown, which felt almost too convenient, like Digg saw an opening and sprinted for it. And I get why — Digg's been trying to claw back relevance for a couple of years now. The reader itself is fine. Genuinely just fine. It looks the most like old Reader of anything I tried, plain list, unread counts, nothing cute. But it choked on my import the first time, silently dropped about a dozen feeds, and I only noticed because I went looking for a specific blog that wasn't showing new posts. Had to re-add those by hand.
NewsBlur is the one I didn't expect to like. It's scrappier, the free tier caps you at 64 feeds which meant I had to actually prune my list (see: dead blogs, above), but the premium tier is $24 a year and after using it for two days I paid it without much hesitation. The training feature, where you can tell it to bump up or hide stories based on keywords or authors, is a little clunky to set up but genuinely useful once it's running. It also has this river-of-news view that's closer to how I actually want to read, less "app," more just text.
I ended up going with NewsBlur, for now anyway. Ask me again in three months.
None of this is a tragedy. Reader was a decade-old product that Google let stagnate for years before finally pulling the plug on it, and honestly the amount of hand-wringing about its death has been a little much considering how few of us were logging in daily. But there's something a little sad about deleting an app icon that's been sitting in the same corner of my phone screen since 2011. I moved it to a folder called "old" before I actually deleted it, which is a very stupid thing to admit but there it is.
If you're still sitting on an OPML export and haven't picked anything yet, my honest advice is: don't overthink it the way I did. Pick one, import your feeds, use it for a week. You'll know pretty fast whether it fits how your brain wants to read things in the morning with coffee, which is really the only test that matters.