So Google Reader is going away....

a pretty flower photo to make sad Google Reader users smile.
I don't normally do tech posts, but perhaps this'll help someone else who needs to make a similar move once Google Reader goes away July 1st.

I loved how all the blogs I read were in one place and I didn't have to flit from blog to blog searching for new posts.

Fortunately, there are other collating blog readers out there (also known as RSS feed readers).

The easiest way seems to be Feedly. You login with your Google account and it transfers everything over for you. When Google Reader goes away, they'll be using a different feed engine. There are migration instructions for Feedly too.

If that kind of thing is important -- Feedly has apps for iOS (iPhone/iPad), Android and Kindle.

CopyBlogger (which has been great at providing these links as part of their article) also suggests using Google Takeout to back up your data or if you want to move to a different blog reader that isn't as easy to move to as Feedly. Probably not a bad idea to do that first, especially if you decide you want to use something else. I don't know about you, but I have a ton of starred items that I probably wouldn't miss, but then I have gone hunting for old articles in the past.

Don't want to use Feedly? The CopyBlogger article has a link to an article on 12 Google Reader Alternatives. (Make that 11, one of the 12 will also go away when Google Reader does.)

Feedly doesn't look the same as Google Reader. Actually, it looks kind of cool. So here's what I've learned in the first five minutes of using it.

(1) Waah! Why is it showing this "Featured" thing instead of all my articles?
Beats me. But on the left side at the top there's this small image that look like short dark grey lines. That's a drop down menu, so you can change what you want to see. For all of them, choose "All" in that menu -- and if you'd grouped your blog feeds (as I did into, "News", "Collage", etc) you can look at a particular feed that way too.

(2) Where are my starred and kept unread articles?
Same menu -- look for "Saved" with a little bookmark image in front of it. It's near the top.

(3) You can make it look a bit like Pinterest.
Yeah, check out the gear drop-down menu on the right hand side, near the refresh button. You can look at your feed a bunch of different ways.

So fellow users of Google Reader .... where are you moving to? Do you use something other than Google Reader to read all the blogs you follow? What is it? What do you like about it?

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