Comment by georgemcbay | Hacker News Reader

Comment by georgemcbay | Hacker News Reader

I think he is vastly underestimating the amount of work required to make a true Google Reader replacement. Reader was a lot more than just an RSS reader, and much more than just the front-end bits. Reading this post makes me wonder if he ever even used it or had much direct interaction with the underlying feed API and all that it offers (historical feed data, etc).

Re-read this blog post with every mention of "Google Reader" replaced with "Google Search" to get an idea of how ridiculous a notion it is that we should just shut up and make our own in a couple of months. Granted, the scale isn't quite the same. Google Reader is not as difficult to replace as Google Search would be, but it is far more difficult than he thinks.

Having said all of this, it is absolutely Google's call if it wants to keep Reader going or not, they don't owe me anything when it comes to Reader or any of their other services that I don't pay for, but OTOH shutting down Reader does mean I'm going to think twice (or four times) about adopting any future Google service. They've now established quite a pattern of killing off things I've grown to depend on, and they are free to do that, but I'm free to avoid their services for fear of being burned again.

That's an interesting comparison... it actually strikes me that Google Reader is much harder for me to replace than Google search. Switching to Bing would be easy, whereas Reader was something I'd integrated into my life, and which I'd curated for myself.

But the part you curated you can export and take with you.

You can't export the content of the feeds (EDIT: using Google Takeout, that is.) Oftentimes, GR is the only one that still has a copy of an older article. What use is it to know I've starred an article if I can't read it anymore?

(To remedy this, I've been using Reeder to export all my starred items to both Instapaper and Evernote. But no thanks to Google.)

Closest thing you can do is grab the JSON of the data as the browser downloads it. The cached content that shows up on a feed's pane is transferred in bulk via JSON, so it should make a decent archive.

Just need a way to do it automatically...

It can be done but it isn't pretty.

My first resort when someone deletes their blog or whatever thing that was meaningful to me that I foolishly failed to mirror, is to go to archive.org and see if they have a good mirror. If they don't but they do have enough that you can find out the RSS URL, you can get google reader's archive of the feed like so: http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/17484/archive-exp...

What you get back is just raw XML.

EDIT: for example, here are the last 100 posts from Mark Pilgrim's blog: http://www.google.com/reader/atom/feed/http://diveintomark.o... ... in this particular case archive.org has a good copy though so this isn't necessary as a last resort.

Here's a way to download the archive of all your starred items, 1000 at a time, straight to XML: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/reader/fMLNWm-s...

I'm a day or two away from "finishing" a script that will allow you to do that (well, at least as far as Google will let me) and pushing it to Github. I'm likely not the only person working on this so I expect we'll be able to save most of our data.

I pushed a small python script to allow you to export your read items as JSON here https://github.com/motdiem/GRARchiver - this can help

I was indeed a Reader user, but by no means a power-user, so I could very well be unaware of some difficult-to-duplicate parts of Reader that are hidden under the covers. Can you let me know what I could be missing?

> historical feed data

Google caches the entire history of an RSS feed from the moment it entered their database. This is in many cases unique, irreplaceable data that's going to have to be systematically extracted over the next few months, because I seriously doubt Google will release the entire data dump.

Thanks, I appreciate this.

In your estimate, what percentage of Reader users have, or will, donate to the Internet Archive to perform this archival task?

At what percentage level would it be wrong to call Reader users "entitled", given that the IA folks were hurting for disk space while these complainers chose to ignore its pleas?

At what point will you stop behaving like an asshole?

Not everyone who complains knows about IA or should necessarily care about it. We are not all the same person with same needs and things we miss from reader may not be the same, but that doesn't mean that it isn't a true loss/problem for each that is not easy to replace (I tried and none of the alternatives come close which is why I WILL write my own).

That kind of language will bring the discussion to an end.

Well, reliable parsing of feeds in itself is difficult and never really solved, but other than that none of the features was difficult to duplicate. They rarely are. But that doesn't mean there weren't lots of them and that building reader is not a huge project.

Sure I could build my own (in fact, I plan to), but this is obviously completely non-realistic attitude to take for every service that can or does bugger you.

Much easier than building these new alternatives is for you to just not read the articles which bother you. Especially since in this case you mostly can know from the title if they will.

I would suggest reading the blogs and information about NewsBlur, the demands on his system are huge. If one is just talking about having a single user RSS Reader these have been around for years, but in terms of a web app for thousands the scale of the database and requests is significant.

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