Okay so Google Reader has been dead for three weeks now (it finally went dark July 1st) and I stopped putting off the migration this weekend. I know, I know. I was one of those people who kept the tab open until literally the day before, refreshing it like maybe Google would change its mind. They didn't. Turns out nobody's mind gets changed by a hundred thousand people signing an online petition either, which, lesson learned I guess.
I exported my OPML file back in June like everyone told me to (good, do that, seriously, even if you're not switching yet) and then it just sat in a folder on my desktop for three weeks doing absolutely nothing. I had something like 340 feeds in there, a lot of them dead blogs I never got around to pruning. Honestly half the fun of finally moving was discovering feeds that hadn't posted since 2011 and I'd just never noticed.
I tried Digg Reader first, since it launched at the end of June and I figured why not, support the underdog. It's fine. Very plain, kind of fast, but it crashed on my phone twice in one afternoon and that was enough for me. So I landed on Feedly like basically everyone else did, judging by the numbers they've been throwing around (something like three million new users in the weeks after the shutdown announcement, though I'd take that with a grain of salt).
The import itself took maybe twenty minutes, counting the time I spent staring at a progress bar wondering if it had frozen. It hadn't. It just really wanted me to sit there and watch it work.
Here's my actual complaint, and it's a real one: the folder structure Feedly builds from an OPML import isn't the folder structure you actually had. Nested folders get flattened in a weird way. I had a folder called "Design" with three sub-folders inside it, and now I've got four folders that all start with "Design" and none of them nest into each other anymore. I've spent more time this week reorganizing feeds than actually reading them, which feels backwards for a tool whose whole job is reading.
A few things I do like, for what it's worth:
- The keyboard shortcuts are close enough to Reader's that muscle memory mostly works. J and K still move you through items. Not everything maps though. I keep hitting "s" expecting to star something and it does nothing, because apparently you're supposed to click the little heart icon like a normal person.
- Feedly Mini, the little browser bookmarklet, is genuinely handy for adding a site's feed without hunting down the RSS icon that half of sites hide now anyway.
- The "must read" feature, where certain feeds always float to the top, is better than anything Reader ever had. I didn't expect to like it as much as I do.
If you're doing this for the first time, my actual advice is: don't just dump your whole OPML in and walk away. Go through it feed by feed the first week. Kill anything that hasn't posted in six months. Your unread count will thank you, mine sat at over 4,000 for two straight days before I gave up trying to hit zero and just marked it all read, which honestly felt like defeat.
Small tangent, because I can't help it: I still haven't found a mobile Feedly setup that doesn't eat my phone's battery. The Android app seems to want to sync constantly in the background even when I haven't opened it in hours. I've mostly given up and just check it through the mobile browser now, which is uglier but doesn't burn twenty percent of my battery by lunchtime.
It's also a little funny how much "here's what I switched to" content has flooded every tech blog the last few weeks, mine apparently included now too. I resisted writing this post for a while because it felt like piling on. Then I actually sat down and did the migration and had opinions about it, so here we are.
Anyway, if you're still sitting on an OPML file from June doing nothing, go import it somewhere. Doesn't have to be Feedly, though that's what I'd tell you to pick if you asked. Just don't wait until your whole reading habit quietly falls apart, because mine nearly did during the three weeks I spent avoiding this.