Google Reader for me was never just a way to plow through a large number of feeds, but also a database of important articles that I lovingly annotated with tags and notes when they still existed. Apparently I was in minority, judging by Reader clients and more importantly its own exporting tools which lets you take away most of your stuff, but not tagged items themselves.

Hence I wrote a quick and dirty Python script which allows you to do just that using libgreader . You can find it on Github and it has few other features like exporting all feed articles. Who knows how long Feedburner will be around so next step will be resolving those links.

My current backup amounts to almost 500MB so script is obviously useful to me. Hopefully it is also to others.  If you find bugs or data that is not exported, but should be, please do let me know.

I am also looking for a good alternative that is not hosted only service, supports archiving and can process most feeds. Currently I am biased to modifying Newsblur to support tagging and running my own instance, but I would definitely prefer to avoid this work if possible.

I like easy-thumbnails and use it often in my Django projects, but I wished for a long time that its PIL generated thumbnails would be smaller. That’s why I wrote image-diet , a drop-in extension for those easy-thumbnails users who use file system for storing images. Images remain visually the same, but can be significantly smaller (mine by more than 50% but your mileage my vary).

This matters because images are together with Javascript main cause for ever larger page sizes which leads to slower websites, especially in low-bandwidth environments. But really, don’t we all want our websites to be as fast as possible?

image-diet was inspired by ImageOptim and Trimage and I’m grateful to authors of both. It uses jpegtran, Jpegoptim, Gifsicle, OptiPNG, AdvanceCOM PNG and Pngcrush to do the heavy work of squeezing redundant bytes. Getting them should be easy as they are part of Ubuntu distribution and can be installed on Mac with brew. For more information please check documentation or ask.

I would love to hear any comments and ideas you may have, even more so if you try it.

RIP .