Searching for a new RSS reader. Again

The king is dead.

This morning I woke up to the news from The Old Reader blog announcing that it will probably be closing down for entirely reasonable reasons. After the closure of Google Reader a while ago they had a massive surge of new users, more than they were prepared for and more than their systems could cope with. After much up and down time, and far too much personal time being eaten the pair of developers have had to pull it back:

'The truth is, during last 5 months we have had no work life balance at all… it tears us to bits if something is not working right, and we are doing everything we can to fix that.  We can’t ignore an error message, a broken RAID array, or unanswered email. I personally spent my own first wedding anniversary fixing the migration last Sunday.'

Desperate times call for desperate measures - The Old Reader Blog

It is sad, but it is a fair call.

So back to the search for a new RSS reader. After the announcement from Google Reader I tried out a couple before discovering The Old Reader; Feedly and Digg Reader were possibles, I couldn't really be dealing with the hassle of hosting my own… Helpfully though some of the nicer comments on The Old Reader post highlighted a couple of other new readers.

While I am cautious about trying out another new beta product after my experiences here, I think I have landed of using Silver Reader. From the short amount of playing around with it, it isn't perfect, but it is good. There is a nice quick OPML import, a variety of view options, standard keyboard shortcuts, and all the rest. So this is where i going to be staying for the immediate future.

Long live the king.

Update:

At this point we are confident that public The Old Reader will be available in the future, now with a proper team running it. Stay tuned!

— The Old Reader (@TheOldReader) July 31, 2013