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.