Pushes Custom Domains as a viable alternative

Jan 23, 2010 10:04 GMT  ·  By
Blogger pushes Custom Domains as a viable alternative, as it drops support for FTP publishing
   Blogger pushes Custom Domains as a viable alternative, as it drops support for FTP publishing

Blogger is one of the most popular blog hosting platform in the world. It provides a simple way of enabling anyone to publish to the web, this is true of any blog platform, obviously, and this is what most people use it for. However, there are those who prefer to have more control over their blogs but still use the Blogger platform for publishing. One way of doing this is by using a remote FTP server to host the files and quite a lot of people use this for their Blogger blogs. Those should be looking for alternatives and fast, as Google is planning to drop support for the feature in the not-so-distant future.

"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," Blogger's Rick Klau writes.

"[W]e have decided that we could not justify diverting further engineering resources away from building new features for all users... [W]e are announcing today that we will no longer support FTP publishing in Blogger after March 26, 2010," he revealed.

0.5 percent of users may not seem like a lot but with Blogger's tens of millions of users around the world, this adds up to quite a few people. They're probably not going to like it but Google is trying to make this as painless as possible and will offer help and tools to aid them transition to either Blogger or a Custom Domain set up to work with the blogging platform.

A migration tool that would automate much of the process is coming in about a month. Google says this should be a viable solution for the vast majority of cases. It is also setting up a dedicated blog for the switch and says it will have people ready to answer any question users may have.