Last Train Out of Here

With “Last Train to Clarksville” continuously looping as ear candy in the back of my mind while I write this, I’ve been struggling with the set-up for a world without Google Reader.

I know: get over it. That’s what everyone is saying.

The deaf have an idiom which, roughly translated, is their way of saying, “You missed it.” The hand motions equate a train, pulling out of the station and down the tracks, vanishing in the distance.

At least, that’s what the visual would look like, if performed in slow motion.

In real life, the action is as quick as the point of the saying: train’s left the station. It’s gone. You missed it.

That’s pretty much what’s happened to Google Reader. If you haven’t taken care of getting your ticket to “ride” on another reading service by tonight, you may as well kiss goodbye your last chance to transfer all your subscriptions. As they used to say in Ameslan, you missed it.

Not to say that changing trains at that new station has made for an easy ride. At least, not for those of us bloggers trying to rescue all those last-minute folks headed straight for a blog-reader’s train wreck.

You may have noticed my recent foray into that foreign world of computer code. Yes, I braved new territory in attempting to follow Feedly’s directions. With great trepidation, I cut and pasted some code (over to the left) and conjured up that green subscription button.

Yes, I know it looks like I was actually successful. Don’t be fooled. Looks can be deceiving.

At least, that’s the conclusion I reached when my favorite guinea pig submitted to the experiment of signing up as a new subscriber to A Family Tapestry on Feedly. The button worked, alright—in getting him from my post to the Feedly site. But it apparently didn’t lead him specifically to where he could subscribe to A Family Tapestry. Instead, he then had to locate the blog via an index and add a few more clicks to subscribe.

I’m not sure that was the non-stop trip it was intended to be. If the “click” doesn’t produce the subscription in one step, why not just place the hyperlinked word “Feedly” in the sidebar and let subscribers fend for themselves? If a button says “Follow,” I want it to do the action it advertises and get me all the way to my destination.

I noticed Feedly seems to be pro-active in advising bloggers via Twitter, so maybe I’ll go that route after the weekend, and hopefully get better informed.

In the meantime, if you haven’t yet availed yourself of a ticket to make the Great Transfer and would be willing to serve as guinea pig in clicking the Big Green Button and letting Feedly be your conductor to a substitute Google Reader destination, I’d appreciate some help with this blogging baggage. Please send me your feedback and let me know how your journey fared.

Otherwise, we’ll be singing along with Google:

We'll have one more night together
'Til the morning brings my train.
And I must go, oh, no, no, no!
Oh, no, no, no!
And I don't know if I'm ever coming home.