Making the Switch: RSS Bandit to Google Reader

Most people who are part of the Blogging community have their daily subscriptions to their favorite RSS feeds and I have a few I like to keep track of on a daily basis. The only tricky part is that when I am at home my RSS feeds are different than the ones I read while I am at work. The only reason for this is because I could never remember which ones I read at work to add them to my RSS feed aggregator program at home.

I’ve been using the popular windows program called RSS Bandit for a while now and having to sync my feeds at home and at the office has been tricky. I miss out on some of my favorite RSS feeds because I forget to import them into the program at home so during the weekend I miss out and some interesting posts.

So I was thinking: How would I go about keeping the same RSS Feed list no matter where I am in the world?

Then I remembered, Google Reader is web-based and I could read my RSS feeds from any machine I had an internet connection with. Two points for me!

How to Export my feeds from RSS Bandit and Import them into Google Reader?

This is done much more easily than I thought it would be. Under the File menu of RSS Bandit is the option to Import/Export. Selecting the Export option asks which feeds I would like to Export and in what format to Export them in.  Choosing OPML is the default choice and this is what Google Reader asks for when you Import.

Importing your feeds into Google Reader

Importing your RSS Feed into Google Reader is as easy as it was to Export them from RSS Bandit. Point the Import option to the file located on your hard drive to where you Exported it with RSS Bandit and click Upload.

All of your feeds will be imported without too much trouble. The only issue that I had was that in RSS Bandit I make use of sub-folders within my main categories. Google Reader does not support this it does support the ability to add top-level folders which will have to do for now.

So now that I use Google Reader for my RSS feed subscriptions, I can easily stay up to date on my favorite sites. If you use iGoogle, there are also widgets that allow you to see your unread RSS feeds from Google reader as well.