Ben's Blog World: Google Reader shuts down July 1, be sure to export your feeds

Sunday, June 30, 2013

Google Reader shuts down July 1, be sure to export your feeds

Google Reader

Whether you've found a replacement service or not, be sure to get your feeds from Google before the shutdown

Monday will be a sad day indeed, as Google Reader will finally shut its doors and stop operating as an RSS feed aggregator. We've covered some alternative (and free!) choices over the past week, but whether you've made up your mind on where your RSS feeds will live post-Google Reader or not, you need to remember to export your feeds before the service shuts down. We can assume Google might hold onto that data for a little while after the shutdown, but there aren't any promises being made.

As we cover in our tutorial on moving over to Feedly, Google Takeout makes it dead simple to get a single file containing all of your Google Reader data. Takeout will provide several different files as part of your Reader export, but the important one will be an XML file called "Subscriptions". You will be able to use this file to import your entire list of feeds to another service later on down the road, and also keep it as a "last good copy" of everything you had. You can even edit it before importing to another service.

You can find that tutorial, along with a few other important posts about choosing a compatible and useful RSS client for both the web and on your Android device, below.