Blogger to Discontinue FTP Publishing in March 2010

Citing a drain on their engineering resources, the Google-owned Blogger announced this week they will no longer support FTP publishing in Blogger after March 26, 2010 (the date has been pushed back to May 1, 2010). For most Blogger users, this is a non-issue. But for web developers who use Blogger FTP and custom templates to seamlessly integrate blogs into existing websites, this is a definitely an issue.

Moondog Web Design currently has almost 100 clients with FTP published blogs integrated into their websites. The modifications required to convert these FTP published blogs to Blogger hosted accounts include updating hyperlinks site-wide, modifying the Blogger template and CSS file, creating new CNAME records, redirecting the XML feed, and possibly changing web hosting and/or domain name registrars (hosting/registrar changes will not be necessary for sites registered AND hosted through GoDaddy or Moondog Web Hosting).

Having a blog in a website is still a very good idea: it saves the client money on site updates, and the search engines absolutely love them, but I still do not look forward to contacting nearly 100 clients and telling them they going to have to pay for maintenance on their sites just to keep their blogs up and running after March 26. The good news here is Blogger is working on a "Migration Tool" that will redirect all traffic from the FTP URL to the new URL. That tool is scheduled to be available on February 22.

Note to all Moondog Web Design clients - if you have a Blogger blog(s) on your website, I will be contacting you during the month of February regarding the cost of the changes necessary to move your blog from FTP to a Blogger hosted custom domain blog.

Remove those "diamond shaped boxes with question marks in them" in your Blogger posts

Microsoft Word uses non-standard characters for quotes, apostrophes, double dashes, and 3 periods in a row (ellipses). So, if you try to copy/paste a Word document into Blogger you are going to get some of those "diamond shaped boxes with question marks in them" wherever you had  quotes, apostrophes, double dashes, and ellipses.
Saving Microsoft Word documents as US-ASCII (plain text) will remove all MS Word formatting and convert those characters into something most web browsers can understand. Here's how it works:
1. Open the Word document then click: File > Save As
2. Save as type: "Plain Text (*.txt)"
3. Click OK
4. A File Conversion Menu will appear. Choose "other encoding", then select "US-ASCII"

5. Check "allow character substitution"
6. Click OK to save
7. Open the new .txt document in a text editor such as Notepad
8. Copy the contents and paste into the Blogger compose window

This method is about 95% effective at removing non web-compatible characters from your document, but of course you still proofread the final draft before posting.

Moondog Web Design v 5.0 is finally online

The new version is a bit more colorful, should be easier to navigate, and has a link to download our FREE Website Planning Guide. Also, the portfolio sample pictures are larger, and I have added links and information for our sister site, Moondog Web Hosting. At the last minute I decided to integrate the News and Tips page with my previously dormant Twitter account. I'm still tinkering with the page background, but I think I'm going to leave it as is for the time being. As always, I would love to hear any comments and suggestions to make the website better.