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Source. Two captured Google stylesheets, and every color, border, radius and pane width on this plate came out of one of them. The sign-in page served at google.com/reader/view/, captured 16 November 2006, gives .bubble { background-color:#c3d9ff; }, the #0000cc link color, .form-noindent's 1px #c3d9ff border, the four corner-cell classes and the unitless lengths margin: 18 and width: 4. google.com/reader/ui/1590367717-shared.css, captured 29 July 2007, gives the 230px sidebar, .item's 1px #ccc rule, the #eaeaea subscribe panel with its 8px -moz-border-radius, and all three message-area states verbatim: #ffffd9 on #a7a772 for info, #fdd on #900 for errors, #b8ff6b on #8bc151 for progress. The announcement is A second spring of cleaning, posted 13 March 2013 by Urs Holzle, SVP Technical Infrastructure and Google Fellow, quoted in full because a loyal following and usage has declined inside one sentence is the entire bargain. The closing screen is the Reader about page as the Internet Archive holds it at 06:40:36 on 2 July 2013: 3,384 bytes, five words, no explanation and no export link.

The artwork is Google's own, and it is served from here. The logo is google.com/reader/static/logo.png, 150 by 53, 4,182 bytes, captured 11 January 2006. The feed, folder and star icons are cut from the real left-hand-navigation sprite, lhn-sprite.png, 96 by 96 on a 16px grid, captured 4 November 2009. The plus on the Add subscription button is add.png, 16 by 12, 240 bytes, and the bubbling flask that runs while a feed is fetched is Reader's own loading.gif, 176 by 63, both captured 29 July 2007. The gradient behind the header is body-bkg.png, four pixels by thirteen. And the corners of the blue box are corner_tl.gif and corner_br.gif, captured 27 August 2008: 2 by 2 GIFs of 43 bytes each, three opaque white pixels and one transparent one. That is what a rounded corner cost before border-radius. The archive's index holds only those two of the four, so the other two corners are the same files mirrored in CSS. Every byte count and pixel dimension here was measured off the file, not estimated.

The refusals are not staged. Thirteen addresses were fetched with curl on 24 August 2026 and the status, content type and byte count recorded exactly as returned. Eight answered with a feed, among them blog.google/rss/ at 28,805 bytes and 20 items, which means the company that retired the reader still publishes the thing the reader read. Five did not. api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss answers 410 Gone in 201 bytes, and the Internet Archive holds that same address answering application/rss+xml, the latest capture found in this check dated 5 June 2013. facebook.com/feeds/page.php answers 404 in nine bytes. The rest answer 200 with between 12,141 and 718,839 bytes of application markup and no feed in any of it. Those numbers will drift, which is why the date is printed next to every one of them.

What is a recreation, and it matters here. There is no capture of Google Reader's logged-in interface anywhere, and there cannot be: every archived request for google.com/reader/view/ in 2006, 2007 and 2013 alike returns accounts.google.com/ServiceLogin?service=reader, and a sweep of google.com/reader/* turns up the sprite, the corner GIFs and the shared-items stylesheet but no application bundle and no application stylesheet. The archive of the product is a request for credentials to a product that no longer exists, and the crawler could not get in either. So the three-pane arrangement is built, not copied, and the plate says so on its face. The items in it are this guide's own filed plates, real titles and real links on this origin, chosen because a reader stocked with somebody else's headlines would be stale within a week. The keyboard sheet is verbatim from the tearoff Reader served on 29 July 2007; j, k, o, m, s and v are wired to do what it says and the rest are printed, not wired.

Deliberately absent. Any figure for how many people used Google Reader. Google never published one, and 500k, 10M and 24M all trace to a leak, an estimate or a guess. The absence is the point: the only people who knew were the people who shut it down. Also absent: that Reader was killed to push Google+, which is the consensus reading and is still inference, not something Google said. Also absent: any date for when Web 2.0 ended, because there is not one, and a slow trade is the more interesting version anyway. Reader's actual wording when it could not find a feed is absent too, because no capture of it survives, so the refusal text on this page is ours and is not presented as Google's. The tombstone's typeface is not Google's either: the real page loaded Open Sans 300 from a font host, and a plate does not fetch from another origin, so the nearest system weight stands in. Finally, the 3,384 bytes quoted for the tombstone is the file as the Internet Archive serves it, injected playback scripts included; the page Google actually shipped was smaller still.

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