Moving Google Reader to Drupal Aggregator
On March 12, 2013, Google announced the retirement of the Google Reader service on July 1, 2013. Fortunately, Drupal 7 has a module that can handle this situation included in core - the Aggregator module. Google's Takeout service exports your list of feeds in OPML format and the Aggregator module can read it. I took some screenshots of my Reader export and import back into the deekayen.net aggregator.
Login to the Google Reader service from a traditional desktop/laptop environment. On the top right of the window, there's a settings cog where you'll find the link to Reader settings.
In the Settings area, click the Import/Export tab, then click the Download your data through Takeout link.
Clicking the CREATE ARCHIVE button queues the export of your feeds to a zip file.
The zip file contains some json files of your Reader followers, articles you liked, and stared, as well as a subscriptions.xml file in OPML format.
On your Drupal 7 site, activate the Aggregator module.
If you want to read your feed without having to be logged in, grant access to Anonymous User to View news feeds.
Go to the Feed aggregator configuration. It is located in the Web Services category of Drupal administration.
The top of the Feed aggregator configuration page has a link to Import OPML. Select the file from your Google Takeout export named subscriptions.xml.
If you have already populated your aggregator with some feeds, you can still import your OPML file with the duplicates. Drupal will recognize the duplicates and ignore them.
The feed depends on a regular cron process running on your Drupal site. It can update the articles in your feed, at most, as frequent as your cron job runs. That means if you have decided on a daily cron job for your website, you may want to change the cron to hourly or every 15 minutes. If you're an administrator of your server, your cron job might then look something like this for a cron every 15 minutes by editing through crontab -e
.
*/15 * * * * wget -O - -q -t 1 https://deekayen.net/cron.php?cron_key=TOKEN_GOES_HERE
The common path to read your aggregator output is /aggregator. If you have a feed reader or mobile app that can still read direct from RSS feeds instead of Google Reader, add rss to the path, for /aggregator/rss.
Adding to iOS Home Screen
You don't need a feed reader app to read your aggregator feed. Load your aggregator page in Safari on your iPhone or iPad. Tap the share link and you can add your aggregator to as an app to your device from there.
Adding to the Android Home Screen
Adding the aggregator page to the home screen in Android takes a few more steps than iOS. This example is for Android 4.2.2 on a Nexus 4 using Chrome.
Add the aggregator page as a bookmark.
Open the list of bookmarks, locate the aggregator bookmark, and long tap on the bookmark.
The long tap on the bookmark should show the option for Add to home screen.
On newer Android installations, you can move icons into folders on the home screen. I moved mine into the News Feeds folder to replace EasyRSS.
P.S.
Also consider having search engines ignore your aggregator feed. It doesn't belong in search indexes. An option to explore for that change would be deleting your robots.txt file and using the RobotsTxt module.
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