So it's been about two weeks since Google Reader actually died on July 1st, and I think I've finally landed somewhere I'm not miserable. Spoiler: it's not Feedly, even though that seems to be where basically everyone I follow on Twitter ended up.
I bounced through three different reader apps in about four days after the shutdown, which in retrospect was a dumb way to handle it. First I tried Feedly because it had the smoothest import — you authorize it and your whole OPML just shows up, no fuss. But something about the interface bugged me, all those big cards and thumbnails, when what I actually want from an RSS reader is a dense list I can blow through in ten minutes with my coffee. Went to NewsBlur next, which I liked more than I expected, except the free tier caps you at 64 feeds and I've got something like 140, so that turned into a "pay $24 a year or start cutting sites" decision I wasn't ready to make at 7am on a Tuesday.
Landed on Digg Reader, which launched publicly back on June 26th, just days before Reader's actual last day. I went in skeptical, mostly because "Digg" has been kind of a punchline since that redesign disaster a few years back, but credit where it's due, the import worked without a hitch, and the keyboard shortcuts (j and k to move down the list, same as Reader) meant I didn't have to relearn my whole morning routine. It's bare bones. No offline mode that I can find, which is annoying on the train, but it does the one job I need, which is showing unread items in the order I added the feeds, and it's fast about it.
None of these are Google Reader, and I don't think anything is going to be for a while. That's the part nobody quite captures in these "best Reader alternatives" roundup posts, and there have been roughly four hundred of them this month. It's not really about features. Reader had eight years of my usage patterns baked into it, folders I set up back in 2009 that I don't even remember naming anymore, and every replacement feels like moving into a house that's the right square footage but none of the light switches are where your hand expects them.
Unrelated tangent, but did anyone else catch the Nokia event on the 11th? They announced the Lumia 1020, the one with the 41-megapixel camera sensor, at some venue in New York, and for reasons I still cannot explain they had Jay Leno come out and host part of it. Jay Leno. At a phone launch. I watched the clip on my lunch break waiting for the part where it made sense, and it never came. The phone itself sounds genuinely interesting on paper, oversampling all those pixels down into a sharper 5-megapixel shot with real optical stabilization, and it's $299.99 on AT&T with a two-year contract when it ships on the 26th. But Windows Phone's app situation is still thin enough that I can't picture recommending it to anyone who isn't already sold on the ecosystem. Camera obsessives might be the one crowd where the compromise is worth it.
I don't have a tidy takeaway here. I'm mostly just relieved to have unread counts again that actually go down when I read things, instead of watching my browser's bookmark folder turn into a graveyard of tabs I never got back to. If you're still shopping around for a replacement reader, my only real advice is to stop shopping and commit to one for two weeks before you judge it. The withdrawal period alone will make every option feel wrong at first.