The Old Reader Works Some Serious Magic

It took a few days, but The Old Reader finally managed to handle the overload on its server from Google Reader users seeking a new home. I uploaded my Google Reader feed file on Thursday night. This morning I received an email that the import process had been completed, and all 378 of my feeds were processed. Their server speed is still a bit slow, but it's understandable. As of March 18th, their user base had grown 12-fold. They've announced that they are exploring a freemium model, but the free plan will keep its current functionality.

As I looked at the feeds, my jaw dropped in shock. I asked myself if it was Easter morning, because the dead were rising from the grave.

When one follows several hundred blogs, if blog posts from any single blog stop showing up in your inbox, you might mourn the loss of the content, but you might not actively seek out where the blogger has moved.  Even if it is as simple as visiting the website and seeing if they made a small change to their RSS feeds, you might not go to the trouble. Some people might clear out the dead feeds, but others would just let them be - you never know when the blogger might reeturn.

Without identifying the blogs in question:

• In one case, the blog feed URL had moved from

www.domainA.com/rss/newfeed.xml to www.domainA.com/feed

• In another case, the blog feed URL moved from

www.domainB.com/blog/atom.xml to www.domainB.com/feed

But I suppose since the blogs were still at the same top-level domain, The Old Reader found it.

In both cases, Google Reader stopped displaying the posts over a year ago.
When I imported the feeds to NetVibes, NetVibes reported them as 404s.