Update your feeds.
For those who hadn’t heard, Google is killing off Reader — which apparently every blog & blogger I follow is using, in addition to being a personal favorite, though also apparently we’re the only ones since Google is going to kill it.
So two thoughts:
First, if you read this fine blog using my RSS feed, please update your link from http://feeds.feedburner.com/rocketbomber to http://www.rocketbomber.com/rss.
Feedburner is a fine service, but it’s also owned by Google, and as recently pointed out by TechCrunch, its days are likely numbered. While this RSS-business is on your mind (and since you might be migrating anyway) please update that link so you don’t lose me in this mess.
Second, Yeah SURE, Google: I can always get my data via Google Takeout and go to another service. Except it didn’t work as advertised. Imagine that.
Oh, I got the file Google provided. I was able to upload said file to a new reader. 3 whole feeds populated – out of 133. Now maybe the new service encountered an error (oh… I don’t know, maybe a thousand people all trying to do the same thing at the same time or something) but I said, “eff me and eff that,” and just did it manually.
Here’s a tip: go to your Reader settings. Click on the ‘subscriptions’ tab (2nd to left). Highlight everything and copy (ctrl-c) the whole mess and paste it into a text file.
Now you have a listing of each feed, which folder you put it in, and the URL. You could use this information to manually repopulate all your feeds into a new RSS reader – I know this works because I just spent a good chunk of my evening doing it. It takes time, but it’s time I had and I queued up some podcasts to listen to while I was cutting & pasting URLs (no, I’m not so nuts I manually typed them) and that was that.
Even if something new comes along later that I like better, I now how 3 backups: the Google-generated xml file, a text listing, and a fully operational set on a 2nd reader app.
