How to Save One, Many, or All Items from a Google Reader Feed Locally

Goo­gle Rea­der, emplo­ying Google’s petaby­tes of sto­rage, archi­ves every feed item it’s ever pulled for you. This has always ama­zed me, as I’m sure I and ever­yone else must be using far more in Rea­der than the 5 gigs we get from Gmail. Still, they don’t have much of a choice; it wouldn’t do any­body good if you could only see the 10 or 20 items pre­sent on a feed’s XML file at any given time. And even though they’re pro­bably cle­ver enough to only have to store one copy of every item for that item’s hun­dreds of thou­sands of rea­ders, they’ve prac­ti­cally built a third copy of the inter­net (after their cache).

A nice fallout of this archi­ving is that whe­ne­ver con­tent you’ve subsc­ri­bed to disap­pears from the web, you’ll still be able to access its (admit­tedly homo­ge­ni­zed) Rea­der copy, fore­ver; “fore­ver” here mea­ning “pre­su­mably for as long as Goo­gle is around.” When (if?) Goo­gle dies, will its data die with it? Des­pite my intui­tion that Goo­gle will long out­last current notions of what com­pu­ters are and how they work, I still don’t like entrus­ting impor­tant data to other peo­ple, not to men­tion data that is acces­si­ble only through the web. I want a local copy.

But they don’t make it easy for you. Rea­der is all AJA­Xed out, so even sim­ple page saves don’t work. Copying/pasting would be a night­mare. Screenshots? Too sloppy. Emai­ling copies of each item? Too time-consuming. Tag­ging them with a spe­cial tag, making that tag’s feed public, then subsc­ri­bing in, like, Thun­der­bird or something? Even if that weren’t absurdly roun­da­bout, the public feeds only have twenty or so items.

I’m tal­king spe­ci­fi­cally about a blog I loved, but that up and disap­pea­red one day, com­ple­tely, lea­ving the only copies of the lost data scat­te­red throughout Net­vi­bes, News­ga­tor, Blo­gli­nes, and Rea­der. Goo­gle searches tur­ned up nothing like a straight­for­ward guide to saving from Rea­der, which sur­pri­sed me. But there were clues, and using only a cou­ple tools, I finally got it. It’s actually pretty easy, I was able to save 118 items in about ten minu­tes with this method. Let me show you it.

You need Fire­fox, the two plu­gins Grea­se­mon­key and Scrap­Book, and the Grea­se­mon­key script Goo­gle Rea­der Print But­ton. Then it’s just a mat­ter of clic­king “Print” for each item you want to save, which opens it in its own tab, then using ScrapBook’s “Cap­ture All Tabs…” func­tion, which auto­ma­ti­cally does a “Save Page As, Web Page, com­plete” into your %App­Data% fol­der for each tab, then finally optio­nally using ScrapBook’s “Com­bine Wizard” (in the tools menu of the Scrap­Book side­bar [Alt+K]) to put all the items into a sin­gle fol­der with a sin­gle index.html file.

The “prin­ting” part is the most cum­ber­some, but goes by pretty quickly with the repe­ti­tion of a series of clicks and keystrokes:

1. Click “Print”
2. Press Esc (to close the print dialogue)
3. Press Ctrl+Tab (to get back to Reader)
4. Press J (to go to the next feed item)

Do that mind­lessly for a cou­ple minu­tes, and they’ll all be there, wai­ting to be saved. I’m gonna put the word “disk” in here too so that any­body Goo­gling for a solu­tion might find this.