Blogger to end FTP publishing; shift to Wordpress well timed
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 caseâthe 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 âonly .5% of active blogs are published via FTPâ and âOn top of this, critical infrastructure that our FTP support relies on at Google will soon become unavailableâ.
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 wonât 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 Vincentâs was hosted at Google almost saw to its total demise, if it had not been for Rickâs 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.
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[…] Google will cease to support FTP publishing on Blogger on May 1, extending the previous deadline of March 26 by a few weeks. As this blogâs posts between 2006 and 2009 were done on Blogger, it means that you will not be able to comment on them after a certain date. It probably doesnât matter, anyway: I have noticed that very few comments come to posts older than three months. Readers will confront dead âPost a commentâ links. The reason? With the end of FTP publishing, Google says it will migrate the 0¡5 per cent who took the trouble of hosting our own material on to its servers. Given that I donât trust Google with my private information, and with the support on its forums about as delightful as Darth Vaderâs breath, I am choosing not to allow the company to migrate this blogâs 2006â9 data on to its machines. Rackspace over Google any day. So before the May 1 deadlineâpossibly even this monthâI will take this blog off the Blogger Dashboard, whereupon commenting on pre-2010 posts will become impossible. That way you wonât need to put up with me moaning about how Google took this blogâs data wrongly. I am enquiring now (since the FAQ does not address this issue) on how best to remove the blogs from the transition, while ensuring the old data remain where they are. Ironically, I have put this question on the Google support forums (letâs hope for better service this timeâthey were never able to answer my Beyond Branding query about our missing home page, and the Social Media Consortium matter you all know about), and on the Blogger Buzz blog, which Rick Klau writes on. […]