I found this news to be crushing–at first. I rely on Google Reader both at home for personal use and at work to keep up on all kinds of great content. Lifehacker says Feedly is the best replacement for Google Reader, but I found The Old Reader and I love it! Here’s what the The Old Reader looks like:

You even get to see the creators and staff of The Old Reader (as of March 13, 2013) in this picture. They have a cool story, so be sure and read it on The Old Reader: behind the scenes blog.

So, I downloaded my stuff from Google Reader and uploaded the special file to The Old Reader. At this point, I was informed that that they got the file, but that there were 4,423 people ahead of me whose files needed to be uploaded first. I thought it was really nice that they let me know.

Pleased with how The Old Reader looked, I decided to just go ahead and subscribe to the blogs I follow myself (I can’t handle more than 30 before I start to get overwhelmed, so this was easily accomplished in about 5 minutes). I just opened a tab for Google Reader and a tab for The Old Reader, clicked on the first one in Google Reader, copied the URL, pasted the URL in the “Add a Subscription” box at the top left-hand corner of The Older Reader, and so on, and was good to go.

The Old Reader looks fresh and pretty and has a great option to “Show unread only,” which I really like. Anyway, I never would have looked for something else if Google hadn’t announced they were shutting Google Reader down–and I would have missed out on my new favorite thing: The Old Reader!

Here’s the link to check it out for yourself, if you haven’t already done so.