Google / Blogger Will Stop to Support FTP Publishing

from Blogger Support
reply-to support@blogger.com
to isidro.flores.jr@gmail.com
date Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 1:04 PM
subject Important: Changes to Blogger FTP Service
mailed-by scoutcamp.bounces.google.com

Dear FTP user:

You are receiving this e-mail because one or more of your blogs at Blogger.com are set up to publish via FTP. We recently announced a planned shut-down of FTP support on Blogger Buzz (the official Blogger blog), and wanted to make sure you saw the announcement. We will be following up with more information via e-mail in the weeks ahead, and regularly updating a blog dedicated to this service shut-down here: http://blogger-ftp.blogspot.com/. The full text of the announcement at Blogger Buzz follows.
Last May, we discussed a number of challenges facing[1] Blogger users who relied on FTP to publish their blogs. 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. On top of this, critical infrastructure that our FTP support relies on at Google will soon become unavailable, which would require that we completely rewrite the code that handles our FTP processing.
Three years ago we launched Custom Domains[2] to give users the simplicity of Blogger, the scalability of Google hosting, and the flexibility of hosting your blog at your own URL. Last year's post discussed the advantages of custom domains over FTP and addressed a number of reasons users have continued to use FTP publishing. (If you're interested in reading more about Custom Domains, our Help Center has a good overview[4] of how to use them on your blog.) In evaluating the investment needed to continue supporting FTP, we have decided that we could not justify diverting further engineering resources away from building new features for all users.
For that reason, we are announcing today that we will no longer support FTP publishing in Blogger after March 26, 2010. We realize that this will not necessarily be welcome news for some users, and we are committed to making the transition as seamless as possible. To that end:

• We are building a migration tool that will walk users through a migration from their current URL to a Blogger-managed URL (either a Custom Domain or a Blogspot URL) that will be available to all users the week of February 22. This tool will handle redirecting traffic from the old URL to the new URL, and will handle the vast majority of situations.
• We will be providing a dedicated blog[5] and help documentation
• Blogger team members will also be available to answer questions on the forum, comments on the blog, and in a few scheduled conference calls once the tool is released.

We have a number of big releases planned in 2010. While we recognize that this decision will frustrate some users, we look forward to showing you the many great things on the way. Thanks for using Blogger.

Regards,

Rick Klau
Blogger Product Manager
Google
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

So, what should I do now? As you may know, my blog is highly customized with PHP scripts, SSI, .htaccess, and these are just a few of the reasons why I get my own web server. Other than maintaining a blog for my photography hobby and writing and posting blog entries of my travel stories, my interest goes deeper as tweaking scripts and tinkering what's inside the web server. Moving to a custom domain will deprive me of the things I enjoy the most. And what about the tons of photos that I manually uploaded to my web server over the years? The moment I move to custom domain, I can only only move the text part of every blog entries because those are saved in Blogger's server. Since the photos will be left in my web server, all blog entries with links to the photos will be left with broken links. If I don't want this case to happen, I'll be forced to download the photos into my hard drive and upload it again to free photo hosting sites. Then I will have to edit the links of the blog entries affected. I even don't have the time to do blogging nowadays, what more of working on switching my blog from my own web server to custom domain? It will be a PAINFUL, PAINFUL move.

I already moved my bicycling blog to Blogger custom domain and it didn't take much effort since I only have a few blog entries right there. As of this writing, I still don't have any idea how this travelogue website will fare with the new Google/Blogger's publishing policy.

Lastly, I can only hope they will not phase out classic HTML template in favor of the layout template.