Google is at it again. They have announced that come July 1, 2013 Google Reader will be discontinued.
Google, why do you giveth and then taketh away so often? I am so over it. I also know that once Google has decided to taketh away, taketh away it will no matter how much I complain. So what to do if you are like me and subscribe to countless feeds via Google Reader? It’s time to export those feeds into another RSS reader of your choice. Fortunately, it’s an easy process.
- Go to your Google Reader and when the message above appears, go ahead and click on the “Learn more” link.
- That will take you to a page that reads, “How can I download my Reader data?”, read it the page, and click on the link that says, “click here.”
- That will lead you to Google Takeout, once the size of your files are estimated go ahead and click on “CREATE ARCHIVE”.
- Once your archive has been created, click on download, you will be prompted to sign into your Google account using your password. Go ahead and do it.
- Save the .zip file somewhere easy to find on your computer.
That’s it. Now you are ready to import your feeds into the reader of your choice. I imported my subscriptions into both NuffnangX and Bloglines (just covering my bases). Follow the import directions for whatever reader you choose. Some will let you import the .zip file as is and others you will have to extract the files and import only the “subscriptions” file that will be in opml (whatever that means, you don’t need to know what it means to be able to do the import).
Update: The following exchange took place in the comments section, I’m sharing it here in case the answer is of use to anyone.
Comment: Apparently I need to know the opml and I don’t have a clue what that is.
Response: You don’t need to know what it is, just where it is. Export your info, extract the files in the zip file, open the folder that is titled whatever your email is and ends with -takeout, that will take you to another folder called Reader, open the Reader folder, find the file called ‘subscriptions’ and that is the opml (in other words that is the file you are going to import into your new reader). Let me know if you need more help.
