Google Reader is going bye-bye. Now what?!

You probably heard that Google Reader will be defunct as of July 1st. So what are we going to do?

Well, first of all: don't panic! It's still a few months away!

It's annoying that GR is closing - I've been using it for years, almost since the beginning and it's just so very useful.

So now the hunt is on for a replacement. Have you got a favourite yet? I've tried a few already, but I haven't found one that's just right. I'll continue to try different ones. And like Diane said "You can bet there are intense development meetings and programmers are clearing their calendars all over the place. [...] I believe we’ll have a whole lot of interesting options to choose from. It never hurts to wait out the acute angst period of any big internet story."

Of the options I've tried so far, these two are my favourites.. although they are not quite.. perfect.

Feedly, which a lot of people seem to like, is very pretty. But I'm not sure I need pretty so much. I need functional that's not a complete eyesore. And because I also use GR to see how many people are subscribed to my blog, I'm really missing the ability to view this sort of information in Feedly. But maybe I've just missed it in all the prettiness?

- Not that I'm totally obsessed with the subscriber number, but it's nice to see it going up. If nothing else, for my own vanity. ;-)

Bloglovin' is getting quite a bit of lovin' (hehe!) in the crafty blogosphere. And I quite like it. There are less customization possibilities than in Feedly, but the layout is quite nice and straightforward. It's supported by ads, but I don't really mind that. I'm pretty good at ignoring those. ;-) I wish Google had supported GR with ads - maybe then they wouldn't have found it necessary to close it down.

Anyway, you can follow my blog on Bloglovin' right here. And if you need to import your subscriptions from GR you can do that here.

But be aware that it won't import your folders, tags or starred items. Instead Bloglovin' has groups (=folders) and ♥ like (=star). But there is no tagging option as far as I can tell. And you have to redo the groups/folders in Bloglovin'. It's a bit of a pain if you've got a lot of blogs. I think I'd recommend going through your GR subscriptions and see if there are any of them you don't like so much anymore. Get rid of those before you import to Bloglovin' to make the process a bit quicker.

I've also tried, Old Reader, Netvibes, Bloglines, Pulse and Newsblur, but they're not quite doing it for me...

Have you got a favourite GR replacement? I'd like to try more!

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