EZReader

(or, if you're tired of services being yanked out from under you, write your own)

Back when Google first announced that they were dropping Reader, my wife and I both had the same reaction: "Can't we pay them like $10 a month to keep it running?"

Sadly, Google didn't seem to think that was an option. At the time, there weren't any other replacements that either of us were thrilled with. And if if there had been, neither of us was thrilled with the idea of moving over to a new service only to have that one disappear, too. A paid service might work - at least then there would be some money flowing to ensure the service stayed available. But there weren't any of those, either.

So I just decided to write one for myself, my wife, and maybe a few friends. All the features of Google Reader (or rather, all of the ones we liked), plus I could bring back the features we used to love that were axed during the onset of Google+.

Thus, EZReader was born. It's been a lot of fun to work on, and has produced some interesting architectural and coding challenges. Best of all, it's open to the public; you can try it and if you like it, you can subscribe for a couple of bucks a month. Since it's a paid service, there are (and will never be) any ads; I don't need to sell your data to marketing or advertising firms to make money, and I don't need to have a million users to keep going (so the service won't be suddenly disappearing).

I'll be posting here about some of the technical aspects of the service and some of the coding challenges. Hopefully it will be interesting, or at least helpful to others.