Google Blogger is Taking Down FTP Publishing

Monday, 1 Feb 2010 in Internet Related Ramblings 3 comments

Its news about a week ago, but on the Blogger Buzz, its was announced that they are going to shut down the FTP publishing feature:

Rick Lau from Blogger Buzz explains:

FTP remains a significant drain on our ability to improve Blogger: only .5% of active blogs are published via FTP — yet the percentage of our engineering resources devoted to supporting FTP vastly exceeds that.

Its sad and will probably wreck havoc for a lot of bloggers. Even though 0.5% of the active blogs are published via FTP, I feel that this would have been the ones which are MOST active!

This means that the only way to have a blogger powered blog using your domain is via their “custom domain” settings, where you own a domain, but point it to the Google servers.

This also means that blogger affected by this will have to migrate their blogs back into Google’s servers. The Blogger Buzz post mentioned that they are going to provide tools and extensive documentation on how to do it.

But, frankly if I’d had to do that, I’d rather switch to WordPress and maintain control over the hosting. Not that I don’t like Blogger, but because there is so much more you can do when have more control over the files on your site.

Comments

  1. I feel that Google is “phasing out” a lot of things that become very important to many people. Google Apps will stop supporting IE6. No more FTP publishing with Blogger. Are they channeling their resources to new area such as Chrome OS? Or are they trying to cut cost? But I thought they are making even more money despite the poor economy.

  2. I think the IE6 thing ought to be done long ago actually. When did a web design project recently, I would spend one hour designing a page, and another hour trying to make it look ok on IE6.

    The impact of that won’t be VERY great – afterall, if someone were to still use IE6 at this age, they are probably very tech-aloof. What are the chances they are using Google Apps?

    On the other hand, taking down FTP for blogger might really cause hysteria cos these are probably the most prominent bloggers using Blogspot!