Getting your data out of The Old Reader

The Old Reader is finally charging for its service, but the rates aren’t competitive with similar/more featureful services, and most users with more than 100 feeds have only two weeks to decide.

To get your data out of The Old Reader:

Export your feeds #

  1. Login to The Old Reader (ThOR)
  2. https://theoldreader.com/feeds.opml

This file is what you’ll probably import into another service to get the same list of feeds. If all you use ThOR for is reading feeds, you don’t really have to do anything else.

Cancel your account #

  1. Login to ThOR
  2. https://theoldreader.com/users/edit
  3. Click “cancel your account”

Dump your shares #

This isn’t built in. You have to use the undocumented API (in a probably-violating-ToS manner, YMMV, not a lawyer, etc.).

  1. Log OUT of ThOR
  2. Open your browser’s dev tools.
  3. In the dev tools, go to the network tab.
  4. On the ThOR home page, click “Login”.
  5. Sign in, then watch the dev tools window.

  6. View the POST request to http://theoldereader.com/users/sign_in. You’re looking for something like:
    authenticity_token=AwHoLeBuNcHoFrAnDoMsTuFf%3D&user%5Bemail%5D=your%40emailaddress.com&user%5Bpassword%5D=P4SSW0RD%G4RB4GE

  7. If you’re on OS X or Linux, go to the command line. If you’re on Windows, get wget first, then open the command line (Start -> type cmd).

  8. Run this:
    wget --save-cookies cookies.txt --post-data 'paste that line above from step 6 INSIDE these single quotes' http://theoldreader.com/users/sign_in

  9. Run this if you’ve got bash (linux, cygwin, OS X):
    for i in {1..100}; do wget -w 2 --load-cookies cookies.txt -p http://theoldreader.com/posts/profile/YourProfileNameHere?page=$i&endless=false >> shares.html; done

A better bash scripter than I may have a much smarter way to deal with this. You should pay that person to write you a better script.

This will crank out HTML of 100 pages of shares and the comments on them. In practice, this should cover about 1 year of an average sharebro (30 items per page, so 3,000 shared items or about 8 shares/day).

I haven’t found a way to get your comments off other people’s shares as there’s no view for that. However, you can swap YourProfileNameHere for any other user’s profile name or profile ID. Go to their profile page and check the URL for their profile ID.

dude bash what, idek, can u just dump for me and print it out an dship it to me #

I can try to dump what I can and email it to you. Follow me on ThOR and comment on this share.

what about likes and stuff #

In step 9, replace the URL with http://theoldreader.com/posts/liked:

for i in {1..100}; do wget -w 2 --load-cookies cookies.txt -p http://theoldreader.com/posts/liked?page=$i&endless=false; done > liked.html

Same with http://theoldreader.com/posts/starred.

how i even read this garbage #

You kind of can’t. If you open the pages while you have an internet connection going, it’ll fetch the javascript and css from The Old Reader and look like the old reader. Otherwise, you only see headlines. But the content’s in there–someone may be able to massage that HTML into something readable. Maybe if push comes to shove I’ll end up doing it.

 
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