Blogger Stops FTP Support

According to Blogger, FTP remains a significant drain on their ability to improve Blogger. And only .5% of active blogs are published via FTP — yet the percentage of engineering resources devoted to support FTP vastly exceeds that. On top of that, critical infrastructure that the FTP support relies on at Google will soon become unavailable, which means that they would have to completely rewrite the code that handles the FTP processing. So they have decided that they will no longer support FTP publishing in Blogger after March 26, 2010.

Although Blogger has provided a number of alternatives for the FTP bloggers to make this transition as seamless as possible.

They are building a migration tool that would help users to migrate from their current URL to a Blogger-managed URL (either a Custom Domain or a Blogspot URL) that will be available to all users in 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. They would also provide a dedicated blog and help documentation to provide as much information as possible to help guide users through the migration off of FTP. Moreover, 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.

So all the FTP users, start packing your bags and prepare to head over to your new home. And if you need any help you can always contact me.