RSS Readers post Google Reader

Well that was easy. After some vexation about what to do after GoogleReader was decommissioned, and about half an hour to fix myself and another half hour to fix things for my wife, blogs continue to be read much as before. 

I used Google Takeout to obtain a copy of all my feeds, and I am now using four RSS readers. 

Perhaps best to start by saying that I am running a Mac and an iPad, so this is probably of no interest to non-Apple-users. 

Firstly I am running the Beta version of NetNewsWire, which I downloaded from their site. It loaded easily enough and just imported all my old feeds. As far as I can tell it either retains the flags for what is read etc on my laptop, or on a NetNewsWire server somewhere. The Beta is free, but I might just stump up and pre-pay for the full commercial version.

Secondly I am running OldReader within my browser for when I want to browse my blog feeds on my laptop. The account is free, and took minutes to set up. 

Thirdly I am using Feeddler Pro on my iPad and this is synced to OldReader.  So to keep in sync, I just use Feedler Pro and OldReader in my browser. 

Finally, I am also accessing my blog feed via FlipBoard on my iPad, which looks lovely, but does tend to crash pretty often, so only really doing this because it was so easy to set up. 

This combination, particularly Old Reader and Feeddler Pro, seems to offer all the features that I want, I am not heavily into sharing or social media, so others might feel that this set up is too limited. Instead of using favourites I now tend to send any blog posts that I particularly like to Evernote, which should offer a degree of robustness whatever happens in future. 

I will just run with these four and see how things pan out, I am not entirely convinced that all the current players in RSS readers will still be about in a few years, so keeping a surplus option or two ticking over is probably sensible.

Good to see that blog postings continue to be posted at pretty much the same volume they were before. Hopefully most everyone else found the transition relatively painless and are still managing to read all the blogs they want to, in a hassle free manner. Blogging is a wonderful thing, and deserves to prosper.