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The announcement on the Blogger Buzz blog had the mild mannered title An Important Note to FTP Users. To the bloggers who use Blogger FTP for their blogs, the news was more of a bombshell.
Some bloggers reacted like Helen Barrett from E-Portfolios for Learning in Blogger discontinuing FTP support.
Now, I need to make a decision... do I host this blog as a blogspot.com address (not accessible on a lot of school networks), or do I host it on a custom domain (I have a couple of them that I am not using), or do I transfer the whole thing over to WordPress.com (not possible in the current FTP format)? So, I have a few weeks to make a decision. ... I will post my decision soon, and will do the appropriate re-directing on my web server. Still, it is irritating, at a time when I am going to be very busy!
Georganna Hancock from A Writer's Edge said in Blogger Threatens FTP Blogs,
If this blog disappears, you'll know why. Oh, please, Lord, don't make me migrate to Word Press.
Suzanne, at Campaign for Unshaved Snatch (CUSS) & Other Rants wrote about it in End of an Era. She decided to look upon it as an opportunity.
This afternoon, Blogger sent an email to the 0.5% of Blogger users who use FTP to upload their blog to a non-Blogger hosted site. They said that as of the end of March, we can't do that any more. People with custom domains would need to transfer to their custom domain services. This means no more cussandotherrants.com. It also means that Google is my host. I understood their reasons, but I still fell into the fetal position and rocked back and forth.
Once I uncurled myself and got up off the metaphorical floor, I realized that maybe this was OK. I pondered the issue on my walk home from work. Sure, now is the worst timing to have to change CUSS to another platform, but it could use a good overhaul. There's no way I could pull this off myself under even the best of circumstances (i.e. - not working full time and writing a thesis). However, people spend money on their hobbies, and so far, blogging has been a pretty cheap one. It's time to invest in it.
Julie from Lone Prairie made the switch from Blogger by FTP to Wordpress a little ahead of the announcement. She explained why in Just in Time.
I loved using Blogger as I did. I wanted my own host, static pages, and a lot of things I couldn’t get through it any other way than by using the FTP feature. As it is, I would now heartily recommend Wordpress (and do) to anyone looking for something similar.
I switched from Blogger by FTP to Wordpress several years ago myself. I wanted tags and categories and stand alone pages, none of which were available from Blogger at that time. BlogCoach just announced that You Can Now Add Pages to Your Blogger Blog! That's certainly good news and may cheer up some of the people who are having a problem deciding what to do since they can no longer run their Blogger blog by FTP.
What to do with your Blogger blog
Blogger suggests moving your blog to what they call a "custom domain." They explain what this is in FTP vs. Custom Domains. A custom domain gives you a domain name of your own rather than a blogspot.com URL, even though the blog is run by Blogger and hosted on Google's servers. To use a custom domain, you first register your domain name. Then, in your Blogger dashboard, go to Settings > Publishing and switch to Custom Domain publishing. Tell them your domain name and you're set to publish there.
Blogger's initial announcement of the change promised help in making the transition in the form of a migration tool that will walk you through the migration from a current URL to a Blogger managed URL. A Blogger managed URL can be either a custom domain or a blogspot.com blog. Blogger also set up a blog dedicated to just Blogger FTP Info to help with the transition.
Blogger Widgets wrote a tutorial about Blogger FTP to Custom Domain Migration that is helpful.
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Virginia DeBolt
BlogHer Contributing Editor|Web Teacher|First 50 Words
