But now I have a theory.
As I mentioned yesterday, Google Reader broke after I merged two Google accounts and deleted the old account. I now have a theory about why it broke.
Google Reader allows you to export your subscriptions as an OPML file, but it has not way to preserve your blog reading history, namely your read items, starred items, and shared items. I use the starred items as my “to blog” list, which overlaps somewhat with my shared items (which I also sometimes blog). Periodically, I don’t share or star an item but still want to find it, and being able to scroll through the read items preserves my ability to do this.
I conceded that I’d have no way to save my read items, but I devised a way to save my starred items.
- First, from my new Google Reader account, I subscribed to the Google Reader Shared Items feed for my old Goggle Reader account.
- Second, from my old Google Reader account, I shared all of my starred items (which involved marking them one by one, so having a “share all” or “star all” feature would be nice).
- Third, from my new Google Reader account, I re-starred all of the shared items to which I’d just subscribed.
- Fourth, from my old Google Reader account, I unshared all of the items that I’d just shared.
- Fifth, from my new Google Reader account, I verified that I could still access these items (which were previously shared, then starred, then unshared). I could, so I concluded this was a successful plan.
- Sixth, I deleted the old Google Reader account.
- Seventh, the new Google Account went into BSOD mode, causing me to doubt my conclusion in step five and/or the design of the Google Reader code.
I did manage to find an email address (labs+reader@google.com) for help for Google Reader by (ironically) Googling “Google Reader help”, but I have not heard back from Google. My Google Reader account, and only my Google Reader account, remains inaccessible.
