Blogger has announced that it will cease supporting its FTP publishing service, which means the shifting of this blog to Wordpress was well timed. It seems I would have had to shift in any case—the fact that this happened just over a month ago was fortunate.
   I received an email about this for the first time from Rick Klau, the gentleman who helped Vincent Wright and I restore his Social Media Consortium blog, today. I was surprised to learn from Rick that ‘only .5% of active blogs are published via FTP’ and ‘On top of this, critical infrastructure that our FTP support relies on at Google will soon become unavailable’.
   After personal experience, I can say Rick is one of the good guys at Google, and I have no doubts about what he says. It highlights that Google wants to host as much of our data as possible, which, as readers of this blog have seen over the last year, is a dangerous proposition. If Blogger decides to pull your blog, then good luck getting it restored: you won’t have ready access to your data.
   In fact, if this blog was not self-hosted, I would have faced far greater concerns with my shift to Wordpress; and the fact that Vincent’s was hosted at Google almost saw to its total demise, if it had not been for Rick’s intervention.
   With hindsight, if it were not for the issues with the Social Media Consortium, my offer to help, and the subsequent stonewalling I received on the support forums, I might never have made the move when I did. Funny how things work out in the long run.