Preparing for Google Reader going away

As you’ve probably heard, Google has announced that they’re discontinuing Google Reader on July 1. Most of you who subscribe to this blog use Google Reader or use an RSS reader that depends on Google’s Feedfetcher. Here’s a snapshot from before Google announced the end of Reader. The proportions have changed slightly since then as people are starting to leave Google Reader.

If you use Google Reader, I suggest you bookmark https://www.google.com/reader. Google has been tinkering with the menu you see when you log into their home page. Sometimes Reader is in the list under “More” and sometimes it’s not.

Try out a few RSS readers. You may want to start with Feedly as it is appears to be the most popular alternative.  A half million people signed up for Feedly within 48 hours of the Google announcement. Feedly is available through your browser as as a mobile app. It will synchronize across multiple devices like Google Reader, but has a very different user interface.

There are a lot of other alternatives, and I imagine more will appear over the next three months. Here’s a list of 18 RSS readers. That post started as a list of readers available on Linux, and all do run there, but I added notes on what platforms each runs on. Most of the readers run on multiple platforms.

You can subscribe to this blog via email. If you go to the web page for the blog, you’ll see a box on the right side where you can enter your email to subscribe. You may also be able to use your email client as an RSS reader directly. At least Outlook and Thunderbird are RSS readers, and I imagine other email clients are as well.