Impending close of Google Reader

The collateral damage of me overreacting to the impeding close of Google reader has been somewhat staggering.  Both in the amount of time I've wasted preparing for it and in me trying to get a handle on my overflowing digital data.  For the time suck I've tried several feed readers, and decided to go with feedly because they are saying that we won't have to do anything if you sign in with feedly they'll import your feeds. I've been using the mobile app for a while now, and the chrome extension is acceptable. I was using a skin on Google reader called Reeder for Chrome that fixed all the white space Google introduced a few revisions ago and Feedly's Chrome extension is pretty close in appearance to that.  So bloggy friends you should give it a try.  In the event that doesn't work out I used Google Takeout to export my data so that I have all the feeds in .json format in the event I want to try a different reader later (Several readers have setup .json imports to get your feeds imported and ready to go.)  You might take some time to download all your bits before the shutdown if you really want to cya should feedly drop the ball.  All of that was really a wind up for what really has consumed the most of my time, dealing with my Starred and tagged posts from Reader.

I've been keeping track of many different things that I'm interested in, with the tag functionality of Reader, and this post on Hackaday.com gave me the keys to get some of the functionality back out of that data.  The original post was a python script to email article to your Evernote account, but the output was rather ugly.  Since then other people have added to that git hub scripts to dump to html files or directly import to Evernote.  Evernote is an okay note taking application (I prefer OneNote from Microsoft), so I've worked through my 707 Starred items from Reader somewhat sorted into notebooks so I can keep my track of my starred items.  Now I need to do the same for my various tags, but I'm finding some sites have gone dark so outside of the giant caching machine known as Google images and even whole articles are missing on the import process, particularly on sites that have changed some portion of their back end in the last several years.

For some reason working on my Reader data also prompted me to start reviewing my terrifying array of accumulated downloads, programs and such.  I have about 80gb of junk on my work computer I've been sorting though.