Good news: RSS-tracking service Feedly has begun migrating users onto its own servers — a necessary move since we’re less from a fortnight away from Google Reader switching off entirely. Bad news: when you migrate, you’ll find your unread articles count reset, and the service may misplace your saved articles as well.
Feedly’s own Twitter posts make it clear that the unread count issue is an unavoidable consequence of how the migration is being staged in a tight time frame:
@monty_ashley Sorry. No way to migrate history so you are starting with a fresh history and unread counts.
— feedly (@feedly) June 15, 2013
@bluemonq Very hard to match the entries between the 2 systems. x a few millions users = hard problem. We focused on performance instead.
— feedly (@feedly) June 15, 2013
People using RSS feeds generally fall into two camps: those who mark everything off, and those who are happy with an unread count in the thousands. If you’re in the former camp (like me), you’ll need to check the unread articles until you run into stuff you know you’ve read, and then mark everything as read (use the Tick symbol at the top of the screen). If you already had a huge unread count, chances are you won’t care if the number changes.
The saved articles glitch is more annoying. I pinged Feedly on Twitter about it, and got this fairly minimal response:
@gusworldau Sorry
— feedly (@feedly) June 15, 2013
I’m going to translate that as “not an issue we’ll be actively addressing immediately”.
So what to do? Up until this point, Feedly has been syncing with Google Reader, and that hasn’t yet disappeared. So your best bet to retrieve the unsaved article list is to dive back into Google Reader and export that data again (or note the stuff you really need). Just make sure that happens before 1 July.
We need a good Reader alternative, and so far I’ve been favouring Feedly, largely because of its keyboard shortcut support. Minor glitches are to be expected, and for a free service things are mostly working well. If Feedly isn’t your thing, there are plenty of other alternatives.
Comments
10 responses to “Feedly’s Migration To Its New RSS Server Has Begun, Is Messy”
I decided to hold off switching to another service until the last week or 2 to make sure I picked the right one. Feedly is my likely candidate atm, but I am glad I waited to allow these teething problems to get fixed 🙂
Checkout SwarmIQ. Similar functionality.
Features: The ability to skim large #s of headlines, organize lots
of feeds, label them, tag articles for later reading, fast unobtrusive
“no magazine layout”.
Sign up at http://www.swarmiq.com/register/GOOGLEREADERISDEAD , click on the Google reader icon to get all your feeds, and get up and running straight away.
Disclosure: I’m on the team that built this site 🙂 Also, we don’t have “Google Alerts” type functionality yet.
Hard to assess right now. The “Mark All Feeds Read” button doesn’t seem to do anything, so wading through 4000+ “unread” articles to see how it might work normally is just not going to happen.
Thanks for pointing us to this.
Sadly, on importing my feed into SwarmIQ, I found my “Saved for Later” list was completely empty, despite my having many starred items in Google Reader. On the other hand, these starred items did show up in Feedly. It appears that SwarmIQ’s uses “tagging” as the equivalent for starring (very misleading, since you can’t actually add “tag” words, as I would expect with a tagging option), but even so, it hasn’t recognised any of my starred items on import.
Unrelated: Consider providing the first line of the article following immediately after the post heading in the compact list view. It’s amazing how much you can tell from the way an article begins, and on exploring SwarmIQ briefly, I realised how much I would miss such a feature (found in both Google Reader and Feedly list view).
But the real deal-breaker is that the list view doesn’t indicate which particular blog or source the item comes from. That removes essential context that readers would want to scan when assessing a list of posts.
You have to admit Angus, it’s a first world problem. I can perhaps understand wanting to keep your saved articles, but I don’t see how articles being marked unread is a big deal. You might have to scroll more than usual. Oh no.
We live in the first world. Most of our problems are first world ones. Does living in the first world mean we can never complain or be upset, or feel betrayed about anything? The NSA snooping shit going on right now is a “first world problem”… doesn’t make it any less terrible.
Anyway, I digress.
I now have 5000 unread items in my feed… I should have around 200-300 from overnight… I don’t see how that isn’t a massive deal… If there was at least a way I could say “mark all posts older than 2 days as read” that might help… but there isn’t.
There is a way to mark posts older than a day or older than a week as read. Not 2 days, by the look of it, but even older than a week would be a start. Find it here (screenshot): http://grab.by/nA6m
Thanks for the heads up. Would have been useful… Luckily I only had about 150 new though so I sorted through them pretty quickly and then marked all as read.
No, but the implication behind the phrase is that even for someone living in the first world, this problem is completely trivial. What real effect will it have on your life?
Complain about public transport, the cost of housing, the lack of childcare etc, those problems are at least somewhat important. It’s completely ridiculous when people complain about things such as how expensive ipads are, or movie/tv show spoilers; grow up.
Take heart. Perhaps they are working on these issues but just not wanting to promise anything.
I just did the Feedly import, with the following results:
1. My 244 unread articles in Google Reader showed up as 244 unread articles in Feedly, and
2. Although Feedly doesn’t give a count for “Saved for later” 🙁 , the list does appear to include all the items that I had starred in Google Reader. At least all the most recent ones. (And if I’m honest, it’s usually only recently starred items that I go looking for.)