nlbarber: (Default)
nlbarber ([personal profile] nlbarber) wrote2013-06-24 10:04 pm
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Trying to move from Google Reader

I procrastinated. I'm not sure if I'm paying for that or if this was inevitable, but....

I read just about everything but email lists and the SFF.Net newsgroups in Google Reader, including all the LJ I still try to track. Facebook is also non-Reader except for the page for Lois where I'm an admin0, but that's one reason I don't keep up with FB much--I'm over in Google Reader. When the announcement came out about the impending death of GR, I did some research, then decided to wait for things to shake out a little.

Now, in a flash <g>, GR goes away next week. I whipped over to Feedly and signed in to have them grab my GR account directly, and quickly discovered that in their move to a cloud system and in the face of masses of people searching for GR replacements, they made the decision to drop 'history' from the list of things they will import. All my starred items, and more important for me, my read/unread flags, are not there, and Feedly declared everything 'read' at the switch-over. Apparently this is supposed to be something you view as a minor inconvenience....

Jumped to The Old Reader, who asked for the subscriptions.xml from Google Takeout to import my feeds. That went well....but they don't have the history, either (it's not in that xml file or elsewhere in Takeout AFAIK). The Old Reader declared everything 'unread' at the time of import.

Guess I could alternate between the two, marking blocks read in TOR and keeping up with the newest in Feedly, but I think I'll do some additional searching for a feed reader which can go to GR and get my feeds and the read/unread flags. Stars are less important, as I use them less and have an IFTTT action to move them to Instapaper, anyway.

Anyone got suggestions? Ideally a service which supports an iOS app in addition to a web page reader, but I'll be getting less choosy as the week goes on.

[identity profile] ann-mcn.livejournal.com 2013-06-25 10:24 am (UTC)(link)
Oh, gosh, I am in the same boat. I love being able to scan over new items quickly, and being able to choose whether to read in that pane or in a new tab -- in Feedly there's a bunch of prettified mess that wants to mark everything read no matter what. I did find another reader, but cannot remember what it was.

I am in denial, I know, and have less than a week left.

[identity profile] mmegaera.livejournal.com 2013-06-25 10:44 pm (UTC)(link)
I swapped over to The Old Reader a couple of months ago, and I'm very happy with it, but I am the most basic of basic RSS feed readers -- I don't flag things, I don't save things (the rare post I do save I just save to favorites like any other webpage). So I'm probably not much help. But I do like The Old Reader. It's Google Reader without the internal politics, so far as I can tell.

[identity profile] kk1raven.livejournal.com 2013-06-26 02:25 am (UTC)(link)
Digg and FlowReader are two others I've seen mentioned as replacements for Google Reader. I syndicate my feeds to Dreamwidth and have never used Google Reader so I can't really comment on how suitable any of the replacements are, but I've seen a number of articles on the subject.