A reader, rebuilt in the dialect Google shipped it in. Read whatever
you like, for as long as you like. When you want more, the Add subscription box is where
it always was, and it still works.
Thirteen addresses were fetched with curl
on 24 August 2026. This box knows those, and nothing else.
Subscriptions
Added today
Field marks
#c3d9ff. The pale blue on this page is not a guess. It is
.bubble { background-color:#c3d9ff; }, read off the stylesheet
Google served with the Reader sign-in page on 16 November 2006. Every Google property
wore that value for years.
A rounded corner was two pixels. corner_tl.gif and
corner_br.gif are 2 by 2 GIFs of 43 bytes each: three opaque white pixels
and one transparent one. Four of them, dropped into four table cells four pixels wide,
made a curve. They are on the corners of the box above, at actual size, and here they
are magnified forty times.
Lengths with no unit. The same stylesheet says body { margin: 18; }
and width: 4. That was invalid CSS in 2006 and it is invalid now, and every
browser did the sensible thing regardless. Three characters, and you can date the file.
Reading was a queue, not a stream. j and k for next
and previous, lifted out of vi and put in a mass-market Google product. They work here.
The full sheet is verbatim from the one Reader served on 29 July 2007:
.
An unread count you could get to zero. A subscription was finite. Nothing on
this page reorders itself while you read it, nothing arrives that you did not ask for,
and when the counts hit zero you are done. That was a design decision, and it is the
single largest structural difference from what replaced it.
The three-pane arrangement is a recreation. There is no capture of
Google Reader's logged-in interface to copy: every archived request for it, in 2006, 2007
and 2013 alike, returns a sign-in screen. The crawler could not get in either.
Verbatim from google.com/reader/ui/1066420768-keyboard-help-tearoff,
captured 29 July 2007. j, k, o, m, s and v
do what the sheet says on this page. The rest are printed, not wired.
Thank you for stopping by.
You subscribed to a source, the source sent you everything, and nobody
sat between you and it. Platforms kept the convenience, dropped the subscription, and called
the result a feed.
Nothing was taken by force. Reader was free and it was good, and the addresses it read
from were open. The addresses closed one at a time, quietly, and then the reader was retired
for the reason given in its own announcement: a loyal following, and declining use.
The box still works. Every refusal on this page is a status code recorded on 24 August 2026,
not a story about one. Of the thirteen addresses checked, 8 answered with a feed and
5 did not. The smallest feed in the set is 3,047 bytes. The largest response of any kind
is 718,839 bytes from a platform, and none of that is a feed.
The announcement has rotted too. Ask for
googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/03/a-second-spring-of-cleaning.html today and you
get three redirects in a row before anything answers, and the destination this project
recorded on 2 August 2026 is now itself a redirect. Checked 24 August 2026.
