Sunday, December 1, 2013

Final Warning: How To Prepare for Monday's Google Reader Shutdown

Final Warning: How To Prepare for Monday's Google Reader Shutdown

Google Reader goes away forever on Monday, so this is your last weekend to prepare for the transition. We mentioned this earlier in the week, but it bears repeating one last time in case you've been procrastinating.

The first thing you'll want to do is back up your data as an OPML file through Google Takeout. You won't be able to access it ever again once the service shuts down, so this officially qualifies as crunch time. Luckily, it's really simple, and we've shown you how to do it in three easy steps. Once you're done, I'd also make sure you have several secure backups saved at home and on the cloud, just to be sure.

As soon as your data is safe and sound, it's time to go shopping for a new RSS home. Feedly is the most popular alternative at the moment, but there are tons of other options if it doesn't check all of your boxes. In case you missed it, we've rounded up some of the best to help make the transition a little easier. All of these services will import that all-important OPML file, but some can pull your Reader data directly off of Google's servers while it's still available, including starred and read items in many cases, so it's probably worth it to set up a new account over the weekend. In fact, if you haven't settled on one alternative yet, you might want to sign up for several to hedge your bets and preserve this valuable metadata.

It is a little bit of a pain to make this transition, but Google's departure from the market opens the door for other companies with great new ideas for what RSS reading should be. Most of them aren't totally ripe yet—Feedly, for example, doesn't yet support data export or search—but in time, we should all come out ahead.

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