Keeping the "keep as new" items when exporting from Bloglines?

September 22, 2010 11:53 AM

I've been an enthusiastic Bloglines user for years, and I've accumulated almost 1,000 items that I've marked as "keep new" which show up at the bottom of each of my feeds, waiting for me to finally get around to reading them. Now that I'm forced to switch (most likely to Google Reader), these items don't seem to get exported to the new reader. How can I retain these items as saved when I make the switch, so I don't have to try and read (or delete) all 1,000 of them by October 1st when Bloglines shuts down??
posted by ericbop to Computers & Internet (12 answers total)

The best idea I could find was to either SHARE them or STAR them, and then use the html page of your shared or starred items to save them all as one big file. Hopefully there's a better way, but that did the trick.
posted by Blake at 12:03 PM on September 22, 2010

Best answer: Unfortunately, as far as I could find, there's no way to do this. The concept of 'saving' items isn't part of RSS itself, so all that is done on Blogline's server. Once you leave them, your saved items data stays behind. I was in the same situation, although I didn't have near 1,000! I ended up just making a bookmark folder for each feed, opening every saved item at once, and using "Bookmark all Tabs" in Firefox.

Also, more bad news: Google Reader doesn't even have this function at all. I've improvised by tagging ones I want to 'save' with 'keep,' but then you have to manually search for the keep tag every time you want to look at them, and it's not sorted by feed.
posted by Hargrimm at 12:04 PM on September 22, 2010

Best answer: I've never used Bloglines..

You might want to try something like Instapaper. It's a bookmarklet that will save the page you're viewing when you click it. To read them, go to the main instapaper website. There you can read them or dl them as pdf's or whichever you like.

This won't get imported into your new rss reader.. but you won't lose all 100 either. You'll have to open all 100 pages in the browser.. but you could probably get into a rhythm.
posted by royalsong at 12:05 PM on September 22, 2010

Response by poster: SHARE or STAR don't show up as options for me. I only see EMAIL, CLIP/BLOG, or KEEP AS NEW. Am I missing something?
posted by ericbop at 12:06 PM on September 22, 2010

erm.. 1,000*

(I somehow missed reading that third zero)
posted by royalsong at 12:06 PM on September 22, 2010

Response by poster: So, are there any rss readers out there with a function similar to bloglines, that will let you tag items to read later, and sort them by feed? After all, why ruin a perfectly good procrastination habit?
posted by ericbop at 12:08 PM on September 22, 2010

Also, more bad news: Google Reader doesn't even have this function at all.

Google Reader will allow you to keep items unread, there's a button, "Keep Unread" at the bottom of every post. Or are we not thinking of the same thing?
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 12:17 PM on September 22, 2010 [1 favorite]

Google Reader does let you star things to read later, and you can keep things unread. It also keeps starred articles even if you unsubscribe to the feed.

When I converted from BL to GR, I emailed myself each post I wanted to save, one by one. I used the Clip function but it didn't seem to be saving me any time.
posted by soelo at 12:19 PM on September 22, 2010 [1 favorite]

So far I have just been going through EVERY SINGLE GODDAMNED SAVED THING and deciding manually whether to save the link elsewhere (instapaper or whatever). I have a lot more than a thousand. This is all I am doing all fucking month now. I hate you, ask.com.
posted by jenfullmoon at 1:31 PM on September 22, 2010 [1 favorite]

Aaand right after reading this post I went to use the "keep as new" feature to save it for later. Gah.
posted by lillygog at 2:49 PM on September 22, 2010

I've been doing the same thing - frantically looking through my 100s of Keep As New posts in Bloglines. And now I realize what an idiot I've been!

Install the Scrapbook extension for Firefox. (I think this works similarly to Instapaper, but I've not used Instapaper so I don't know for sure.)

(Optional: Install Adblock Plus and spend a few minutes setting up some filters to block ads and extraneous pictures. I hate pictures in my feeds, so I block them when I can.)

Go to your Bloglines page. Show All your feeds. Right click and Capture Page (from Scrapbook menu). This part may take a while if you have so many. Alternatively, you could capture each feed separately, buy clicking on the feed name and then right-clicking to Capture.

And there ya go. Later on when you have time to read, open up that saved page from Scrapbook, and it's as if Bloglines never went away.

I've been bookmarking my saved posts, rather than importing them into Google Reader, since I would have been bookmarking them from Google Reader anyway.
posted by SuperSquirrel at 7:52 AM on September 23, 2010 [1 favorite]

You'll have to open all 100 pages in the browser.. but you could probably get into a rhythm.

In Firefox, you can right click a link and save it as a Bookmark without having to open the page. You can even select a specific folder to put them in. Just make sure that Bloglines is providing the actual URL and not some link wrapped in a Bloglines URL.

Then, if you want you can export those links to an HTML file (delicious provides these instructions:1. Choose "Organize Bookmarks" from the Bookmarks menu. 2. Choose "Export..." from the File menu. 3. Choose a location for your file (such as your desktop) and click Save.).
posted by soelo at 8:16 AM on September 27, 2010