Nearly two weeks have passed since Google shut down Reader, the company’s popular RSS feed reading service. While users who relied on Reader for daily (or if you’re like me, hourly) updates from their favorite websites have migrated to other services by now, there may be a few stragglers who haven’t made the move yet. If you’re one of the latter, or if you just want to back up your list for future use, Google has made it ridiculously quick and easy to grab your data as an OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language, but don’t worry about what it means) file, but you need to act now. Next Monday, July 15 at noon PDT, Google is deleting all of its stored Reader data. Even if you haven’t figured out which RSS alternative to use yet, do yourself a favor and follow these simple steps to save your data.
Go to Google Takeout through this link, which should pre-select only your Reader data. Click “Create Archive” at the bottom of the screen. When Google is done compiling the data, hit the download link for a zipped archive. You want to keep that archive somewhere safe, but what you need to do to upload your data to another service is the subscriptions.xml OPML file within that zip. If you open an account at Feedly, for example, uploading your OPML file at this link recreates your RSS lists and any folder organization you’ve made in Reader. Any other service worth its salt has similar procedures in place.
Repeating, because I don’t want to hear any bellyaching about this on Tuesday, do this now before it’s too late.
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