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Ask HN: Feed readers preserving old and already read posts
As many HN users, I was using Google Reader. I won't say it was an
extensive use, as my feed reading activities declined in recent years,
but G's decision about taking down GR [0] was quite unexpected. Back
then I used Google Takeout [1] to retrieve my GR subscription data ("eg.
lists of people that you follow, items you have starred, notes you have
created, etc."). Next step was doing a quick research over available
alternatives.
I found The Old Reader [2] to be a promising one solution. (Apparently
there were lots of importers, so I was queued as ~1000th one, which
meant I have to wait a few days before all my feeds would be accessible
within TOR.) I didn't see any old posts in my feeds subscribed
previously in GR for many years, so I was unhappy about it (you know,
some sites ceased to exist already), but I assumed nothing can be done
here, because G obviously wouldn't allow downloading easily all the old
posts from feeds. And to be honest, most of them weren't worth of
archiving, but most doesn't mean all. Some time later I noticed that TOR
improved keyboard-driven UX, so I was finally able to use handy
shortcuts like Shift-A (mark all items as read in current feed/group)
[3]. Lately they finally added API [4]. I thought I'll stay with TOR for
now, but today after logging in I saw:
You have not used The Old Reader for a while,
so we kept only fresh posts for you
What? Is this some kind of twisted courtesy? Putting sarcasm aside,
it's my fault for not investigating TOR enough. I understand well that
storage isn't free and GR pampered us a bit with its (almost) never
ending history in feeds, but it's such important feature that I took it
for granted. TOR KB has a page about it [5].
continued in comments...
(1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6041145
(2) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6041149
Sorry for such a long submission.
tl;dr question:
Is there any free on-line feed reader, similar to GR, committed to preserve old and already read posts, no matter how actively I read them? It would be great if it supports keyboard-driven navigation (with GR-like shortcuts, hopefully) and has mobile apps (Android at least). Bonus point would be possibility of exporting historical feed data.
- przemoc 13y ago(1) TOR KB has a page about it [5], which I'll quote here just in case: How many posts per feed do you store? You may only see several dozen posts when you subscribe to a new feed because RSS feeds only contain the most recent posts. However, new posts will be fetched as they get published, and The Old Reader will store up to several hundred posts per feed for any active user. If you don't access The Old Reader for a while, your account will be marked as inactive, and we will only keep the last 10 entries of each feed for you. Shared, commented, or liked posts are currently stored forever. "Up to several hundred posts" is quite vague term, and definitely not enough for long-running sites that publish new stuff often. Second problem is being "active user". There are weeks when I am so busy that I check only LWN.net in tram on my way to or from the work, thus I may be "inactve" (from feed reading viewpoint) even for a month. This makes TOR unsuitable for me after all and this is unfortunate, because I started to like TOR. I noticed that in comparisons of feed readers (almost?) no one is looking at how long the old posts are available, that's why I'm asking the HN community: Is there any free on-line feed reader, similar to GR, committed to preserve old and already read posts, no matter how actively I read them? It would be great if it supports keyboard-driven navigation (with GR-like shortcuts, hopefully) and has mobile apps (Android at least). Bonus point would be possibility of exporting historical feed data.
- przemoc 13y ago(2) PS: A few days ago I learned about unofficial GR API [6] (I'm pretty sure it had to be already covered on HN, but I'm not always a daily HN reader, so I could miss it) via LWN.net article [7] (sorry, it's not available for free yet and there are too many HN users out there, so using the so called "Free Link" wouldn't be acceptable IMHO). But it's no longer available [8]. There is also "a collection of tools to help with the Google Reader shutdown" called Reader Is Dead [9], with extremely useful reader_archive [10], but well, it's not longer useful. If I only knew about it before the shutdown... Thankfully Archive Team [11] retrieved historical feed data from GR using its API [12], so not everything is lost. Over 8TB of data converted to WARC files (specification of ISO 28500:2009 [13], free final draft [14], "Everything about the WARC format and the tools that support it." [15]), in tarred+gzipped form can be downloaded [16]. My 0th rule of the internet: You have to constantly backup it! [0] http://googleblog.blogspot.com.au/2013/03/a-second-spring-of-cleaning.html [1] http://www.google.com/takeout/ [2] http://theoldreader.com/ [3] http://blog.theoldreader.com/post/49375135562/may-1-release-is-here [4] http://blog.theoldreader.com/post/53860614326/weekly-update-june-24-30 [5] http://theoldreader.uservoice.com/knowledgebase/articles/146276 [6] http://undoc.in/ [7] http://lwn.net/Articles/558138/ [8] http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2013/07/a-final-farewell.html [9] http://readerisdead.com/ [10] https://github.com/mihaip/readerisdead/wiki/reader_archive [11] http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Who_We_Are [12] http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Google_Reader [13] http://www.iso.org/iso/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=44717 [14] http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf [15] http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=The_WARC_Ecosystem [16] http://archive.org/details/archiveteam_greader