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Google discontinuing FTP support for Blogger blogs
Love it or hate it, Blogger was the tool that really brought blogging into the mainstream. Once upon a time, the only way to have your blog hosted on your own domain was to use Blogger as the content management system, but then have it use FTP to push HTML pages to your web host.
Fast forward to 2010, and it turns out that only half of one percent of Blogger's users are using Blogger's FTP upload ability, but maintaining that functionality is consuming considerably more than that percentage of Blogger's engineering resources. Worse, Google is dropping the infrastructure that Blogger uses to push out FTP updates, which would then require a complete rewrite of the code that handles Blogger's FTP processing.
So, Google has decided to drop FTP support from Blogger. Though the numbers clearly show that overall it's not that popular, I think some people still think Blogger's killer feature is the ability to FTP plain HTML files.
The one saving grace is that if you are currently hosting a site that is updated by Blogger with FTP, you're not going to lose anything except the ability to continue to update the site - if it's an old site, it will keep on keepin' on. That's the beauty of HTML files. If you are still actively blogging, however, you'll want to check out the new Blogger FTP blog they've set up to try to help migrate users to their custom domains solution.
Comments
10
Subscribe to commentschrisgFeb 2nd 2010 6:55PM
This is such crap and I'm leaving my blogger account because of it.
Without this, you HAVE to use Blogger for hosting.
But they have a CRAPLOAD of users, so 0.5% is still a LOT of people when you consider they're probably SMARTER users than people with a blogspot domain. (Be honest. Do you trust any 'site' that's on blogspot? It's like the geocities of Web 2.0)
RichardFeb 2nd 2010 9:10PM
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mblindFeb 2nd 2010 10:37PM
hello wordpress, Goodbye blogger.. what a lame move.
Bryan PriceFeb 2nd 2010 11:10PM
Yeah, as soon as my server gets moved/upgraded (something's happening to it, it's a friend's server at his site, and I get it for free, I can't bitch), I'll be transitioning to Wordpress.
I haven't figured out if I'm going to leave my linkblog as a blogspot blog or move it to Wordpress yet. Not that it's that busy right now. I'm working on a program that takes my Delicious posts, formats them to conform with my linkblog, and then post/publish them. I can get the posts and format them. I *was* working on the Atom Publishing to get them to Blogger. I may yet anyways, since Wordpress supports it as well.
I think it sucks. I'd like to see more time actually, but this gets me moving now instead of later I guess. I just need my friend to get those changes done.
TomFeb 2nd 2010 10:46PM
@chrisg
How about strobist.blogspot.com?
I see your point, but there are a lot of quality blogs on Blogspot (along with the garbage).
whiskeyFeb 3rd 2010 1:35AM
It's not so difficult to migrate though, from Wordpress you can import your blogger errr.... blog.
http://createwithnate.com/how-to-transfer-your-blog-from-blogger-to-wordpress
JayenkaiFeb 3rd 2010 4:13AM
Damn..
I used to write in blogger, and then get it to send specially formatted "Not HTML at all" files, with BBCode style elements for headers and such, and then use my server to reconstruct that in whatever layout the user had chosen.
..
True, that was about 5 years ago, and I've been using Wordpress for ages, but a lost feature is still a lost feature.
I won't be back, google!!
But I still love you!!!
Rich GautierFeb 3rd 2010 7:38AM
What this means is that you're left without a real option. If you're using ftp from Blogger, it's because you need the text files that Blogger puts out. Migrating to their hosted solution doesn't do you a bit of good if you've got custom content handling. And WordPress isn't the answer - instead of having a blog that works but you can't update without the Engine, you end up with a blog that DOESNT WORK when the Engine conks out.
At least with Blogger, you had your content files and they were already HTML. With WordPress, if your DB goes tits-up, your blog isn't usable by your readers (kind of defeats the purpose of content management when the content can become unreadable).
What we really need is a tool that will allow us to continue to manage the content in the XML file that you can export from Blogger and still output your custom HTML.
Erik AronestyMar 8th 2010 1:54AM
Info on how to keep using Blogger & FTP:
http://www.documentroot.com/2010/03/how-to-fix-bloggers-ftp-bug.html
I'm going to eventually run it as a free service, when the script is clean enough.
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