(Cross-posted from Blogger Buzz)
Last May, we discussed a number of challenges facing Blogger users who relied on FTP to publish their blogs. FTP remains a significant drain on our ability to improve Blogger: only .5% of active blogs are published via FTP — yet the percentage of our engineering resources devoted to supporting FTP vastly exceeds that. On top of this, critical infrastructure that our FTP support relies on at Google will soon become unavailable, which would require that we completely rewrite the code that handles our FTP processing.
Three years ago we launched Custom Domains to give users the simplicity of Blogger, the scalability of Google hosting, and the flexibility of hosting your blog at your own URL. Last year's post discussed the advantages of custom domains over FTP and addressed a number of reasons users have continued to use FTP publishing. (If you're interested in reading more about Custom Domains, our Help Center has a good overview of how to use them on your blog.) In evaluating the investment needed to continue supporting FTP, we have decided that we could not justify diverting further engineering resources away from building new features for all users.
For that reason, we are announcing today that we will no longer support FTP publishing in Blogger after
- We are building a migration tool that will walk users through a migration from their current URL to a Blogger-managed URL (either a Custom Domain or a Blogspot URL)that will be available to all users the week of February 22. This tool will handle redirecting traffic from the old URL to the new URL, and will handle the vast majority of situations.
- We will be providing a dedicated blog and help documentation to provide as much information as possible to help guide users through the migration off of FTP.
- Blogger team members will also be available to answer questions on the forum, comments on the blog, and in a few scheduled conference calls once the tool is released.
I am from China.I think you know that Blogger.com was blocked here.This is the only way that i can use Blogger.com in China. Now i feel sad,I love my country and i hate the Great Fire Wall
ReplyDeleteHmm... good indication. Now I will make sure I am not caught off guard once Google announces a feature it is going to stop supporting or continuing. And there's no reason I will host my custom domain on Blogger which was my earlier plan.
ReplyDeleteThanks. How about a tool to help those of us who want to migrate off of Blogger, ie leave? My blog is only part of my site. To move my blog to my custom domain will result in crippling my site. I don't want a site that is only a blog, which is the only option your decision leaves me if I want to stay with Blogger. So I'm off to Wordpress. I'm sure the loss of 0.5 of your blogs won't hurt you (although I'm sure this represents a vastly greater proportion of active and useful blogs, given how many Blogspot blogs are spam). I can assure you the amount of my goodwill you've lost is more than 0.5%. I'm likely going to note my Blogspot blogs too, and am reconsidering the purchase of additional Picassa storage.
ReplyDeleteI have to say,it's a very SAD news for many Users from China ,Hillary Rodham Clinton tell us about Internet Freedom,and she says will supporting more tools to help us to get Internet Freedom,but you against it :(
ReplyDeleteThis is a real shame and headache at the same time - I use blogger as a small part in huge websites - and like mentioned before this will now result in custom domains being no more than blogs .. and I also agree that the 0.5% of users who FTP are more than likely some of the most active .. Off to Google 'Word Press'
ReplyDeleteHello my name is Jc Denton, I'm Adiministrador blog Jet Hot Downloads
ReplyDeleteand was wondering if turning off this feature, will involve the development of new features for Blogger?
It's a sad news for me. I am from China.
ReplyDeleteThat really sucks. My template uses PHP, and I'm sure that the Google hosted site won't support PHP either. And since I don't have a control panel to set the DNS up (it's on a friend's server), that's going to be tricky. And updates to the A numbers might be ticklish as well.
ReplyDeleteEven if you did, there's still the matter that I'm going to have to go through and fix any relative HREFs to pictures and what not.
At this point, it might be much easier to just move to Wordpress.
Not good news.
@Paul - The tools to help migrate off of Blogger to another system already exist. You can download a backup file of your blog from your blog dashboard, and the Data Liberation Front (http://www.dataliberation.org/) already has a set of open source libraries for converting that file into the import format for popular blogging platforms (http://www.dataliberation.org/google/blogger).
ReplyDeleteWe'd hate to lose you, and I assure you that this decision was not made in haste nor was it made without careful consideration of the impact to users like you.
@jethotdownloads Nearly all of the feature development over the last three years has been available to those who host their blogs on Blogger, so anyone making the transition will have access to those features for the first time. Additionally, we have a number of major features under development that we will only be able to offer to those who host their blogs on Blogger.
@bytehead Blogger custom domains also include support for something called a "missing files host": when things like images are requested to the domain we manage and generate a 404, you can specify a backup domain we should reference. More info here: http://www.google.com/support/blogger/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=68503. This means that you can define www.yourdomain.com as the missing files host, which would mean that all relative HREFs would continue to work.
Having looked at Data Liberation, they seem more focused on how to get people from other platforms ON to Blogger. Their solution for getting off of Blogger is "export your blog from the Dashboard" - with no further instruction.
ReplyDeleteThis tool seems the best option for converting to the Wordpress format, and Wordpress can be found here - http://wordpress.org/
Rick, you said "we'd hate to lose you" as if there is some kind of doubt. I run two blogs on my website. Migrating to a custom domain would only allow one of them to operate, and would mean I lose all my other pages on my website. I'm left with no option but to leave. Of my two remaing Blogspot blogs, one I have been in discussion with my co-bloggers for some time about moving to Wordpress, and the final one I'll move on principle.
Rather than upgrade to more storage with Picasa, I'll switch to Flickr or similar. I choose Google initially to have all my web needs in one place. Since I'm being forced to fragment, I might as well ensure all my web needs are controlled by different companies, so that no one company can so comprehensively shaft me as Google will. There is no doubt here. You have lost me. The only thing I'm keeping is my mail, and only because to dumpt that now would be even more of a complete pain than moving my blogs will prove to be.
More importantly, I didn't know anything about this until my WIFE mentioned it to me, meaning that had she not, I might have known nothing about this until I lost the FTP capability.
As you can see from the comments, this decision is disastrous for freedom of speech in China. Bad enough Google abandoned China, now to remove one of the means to bypass repressive censorship?
So, yeah, thanks Google. I had a really good few years with you. The ironic thing is I actually do understand the rationale behind the decision, but the way it is being handled (short time from announcement, not well publicised etc) has soured my opinion of you.
@Paul - the Data Liberation Front page links directly to this project, managed by them: Google Blog Converters, which handles the conversion from the Blogger export format to a number of other import formats. The tool you linked to is an implementation of those libraries, that we set up as an example of how the converters would work.
ReplyDeleteFor multiple blogs on a single domain, the way to manage that with custom domains (may not be what you want, but is an option) is to use multiple subdomains (blog1.yourdomain.com, blog2.yourdomain.com, etc.). I continue to host a number of non-Blogger-managed files at www.rklau.com, and use tins.rklau.com for the blog. All files/images I'd uploaded over the years (as I converted from Movable Type, to Wordpress, back to Blogger) continue to work just fine. Your files at www.yourdomain.com would continue to work just as they do today.
Re: timing: we have an e-mail that will go out to every current account holder with one or more FTP blogs as soon as possible, but which requires internal approvals to comply with our bulk mail policies. Rather than wait to post to the blog until that was approved, we wanted to get the announcement up as soon as all decisions were official internally. I'm sorry that you feel 2 months isn't enough time.
Quick follow-up on communication: we will also be placing an alert in all affected users' dashboards, and will send several e-mails between now and when the feature is officially turned off in March. We want to ensure everyone sees this info - I'm open to other suggestions about the best way to spread the word.
ReplyDeleteGolden Opportunity for some smart group to build a cloud based CMS that updates your files via FTP on your own web server... (Rocket Science?)
ReplyDeleteWhat a nightmare situation. Our site has used Blogger for over 6 years and has over 60 blogs on different themes, so a custom domain isn't an option for us and the solution proposed here ((blog1.yourdomain.com, blog2.yourdomain.com, etc.) is going to take ages, especially since it is something we haven't planned for. How can the old URLs still work if the new URL has changed? Will they be duplicate pages? Or would we have to redirect them too (503?). Whatever solution we decide on to confront this situation is going to take time for companies with multiple blogs on one site - 2 months isn't very long at all. Just to give you an idea, our Blogs receive over 700.000 unique pageviews per month. And they're ALL with Blogger :(
ReplyDeleteThis is the very sad news for me. I do not know what should i do now. I hope this plan is cancel because i love my url.
ReplyDeleteYou wrote, "Blogger team members will also be available to answer questions on the forum...." This is in the future tense (fair enough), and I don't see a migration thread on the forum yet. Can you launch the relevant thread or section soon and post the URL here? I have a *load* of questions. Thanks.
ReplyDelete@Peter Was waiting on the help forum until the tool's released; the support team is working on documentation and a check-list now which we'll get up as soon as they're ready. In the meantime, feel free to post questions here or post to your blog; I'll address them as best I can.
ReplyDelete@Rick. Thanks. Here's a start. (1) Can I host my blog at its current domain rather than a new one? (2) Must I give up my current template --customized over 7 years-- and switch to a canned template? (3) Will the migration tool handle very large blogs? Mine has more than 18,000 posts and more than 400 archive files. (4) Is migration reversible? I know I can pull the plug on the new version and abandon it. But apparently part of the migration is to tell Google to search the new version instead of the old one. Can I reverse that if I decide the kill the new one?
ReplyDeleteIf we have been using the video feature, what happens to our videos stored via Blogger? I will be moving off Blogger and want my videos.
ReplyDelete@Peter:
ReplyDelete1) yes, but if you have files hosted at that URL other than your blog posts you'll want to map a secondary domain and use Blogger's missing files host to ensure that they'll still work. If you don't have uploaded files, you'll be good to go.
2) You can use your own template.
3) Yes.
4) No, it's not reversible through the wizard. That said, You can always update your template to point to a new location, or reclaim the CNAME to a server you control and use htaccess to further direct requests for URLs.
Ugh. I just spent the entire weekend formatting my blog to work with my new ASP.NET Master Pages AND THEN I saw this post...
ReplyDeleteIs there going to be an easy-ish way for folks using different file extensions (i.e., .aspx) to migrate their template?
@Ms. VBA - no, permalinks managed by Blogger are fixed .html extensions, and will not be configurable. You'll need to just remove any server-side includes/code you've got in your template in order for it to render properly at Blogger.
ReplyDeleteOne thing I don't see explicitly mentioned anywhere in all the official postings is if this applies to SFTP as well as FTP. Some may consider this obvious but to me its very different and if the definition of FTP includes SFTP that put me down as officially p'd off.
ReplyDelete@BillSaysThis Yes, this covers both SFTP as well as FTP.
ReplyDeleteSo what is the new solution - Custom Domains? How does that copy to my webhost without using ftp?
ReplyDeleteAnd I read somewhere my customized template will no longer work?
Could someone who understands the new system please draw a diagram?
JVK - A custom domain is one that is hosted by us on your behalf. When we host the content, we do not transfer it to your domain, rather, you point requests for www.yourdomain.com (or blog.yourdomain.com, or a URL of your choosing) to our servers and we serve those requests.
ReplyDeleteYour template will continue to work.
A diagram is a great idea, I'll work with our designer to get something helpful up.
After having been with Blogger since the very early days (long pre-Google, even pre-Blogger Pro), it will make me sad to leave the platform. Unfortunately, I use my domain for a lot more than just my blog, so migration isn't really an option for me.
ReplyDeleteOnce FTP goes away, will we still be able to access our blog posts through the Dashboard for exporting purposes?
@mkhall You can't use a subdomain (like I do on my domain - tins.rklau.com for my blog, www.rklau.com for other stuff)?
ReplyDeleteYour blog will always be accessible from within the Blogger dashboard, and we will also provide both a full XML export file and a Zip file with all HTML contents that you can upload to another host if you choose.
I, too, have been with blogger since the very early days (before Google and Blogger Pro), always using my own domain and giving proper credit back to blogger. It always felt like blogger was a helpful partner (although in the last few years you became more cumbersome). Now I guess we're at the end of the road. I have no interest in you hosting my sites, thanks. So long blogger.com!
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteIt doesn't sound like I'd be able to keep my blog at www.site.com/blog after migrating?
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteI'm a little confused. I'm reading the information at http://buzz.blogger.com/2009/05/ftp-vs-custom-domains.html and if I read this correctly I will be establishing a blog subdomain that is actually hosted at Google, while the rest of my site is host on my own ISPs servers, and will have to update my nameserver information so that that subdomain points to your servers.
ReplyDeleteI use register.com and don't really know what I'd need to do to register a name server pointer to a subdomain while maintaining the settings for the rest of my site.
Any further elucidation would be welcome.
Thanks,
Dan
Dan - you've got it. Specific instructions on setting up a CNAME at Register.com (under "other registrars) are here.
ReplyDeleteHi Rick,
ReplyDeleteThis is beyond my technical ability.
I'm worried about the blog I've been running for 5 years at www.birddigiscoper.com.
Cheers,
Mike M.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete@Mike We're building the Migration Tool specifically to help users like you make the transition without having to become DNS experts. Stay tuned for more info, a walk-through video, and more details regarding the migration tool as it becomes available.
ReplyDelete@Alard Blogger will not be able to publish to a directory on your site.
ReplyDeleteI would like to continue to use blogger, while continuing to post the blog / content to my existing website. Is there a "workaround" or methodology you can recommend to allow me to do this this?
ReplyDeleteI have been digging around in response to your announcement, and have yet to find this information.
By way of explanation, my blog is just another part of my website, and I don't want to fragment my content, scatter my users onto multiple sites, fragment my web statistics, remove my blog from my robust on-site search capability, cause search engines to direct our traffic to other-than-our main site, screw up our URL pathing methodology, etc, etc, etc, etc, complicate our navigation and maintenance, and so on. Also, we generally strive to have one concentrated site which is easy to mirror, and where we can copy (almost) all our content onto a CD or DVD that can be navigated from disk without internet access for whatever (e.g. presentation) purposes without needing internet connectivity.
Lame as hell.
ReplyDeleteRick, thanks for your quick reply, however, I did not ask if BLOGGER would be able to publish to a directory on my site. I read the announcement and while I don't like it, I got and I GET the point that you aren't going to do that anymore.
ReplyDeleteWhich is why what I was and am asking is if you know how I could ACCOMPLISH THE SAME THING by some other means!? (e.g. did you miss my use of the term "workaround"?)
For example, how can I copy the content from the blogspot site, or whatever location you're forcing us into, to where I actually want the content?
Since you obviously have problems with ftp, I guess I can presume I won't have ftp access to the blogspot site (or whatever you're forcing us into), so will I have to use some software tool to copy the site onto my hard drive, then ftp it to my website?
Many of the users you are causing to run off in a huff with this change of policy will find that other blogging software and services, generate only dynamic page output, and do not generate static (.htm / .html) pages.
So long and thanks for all the fish... I'll be looking for another way to run my blog - I want my blog on my domain (owned by me), hosted on a server owned/rented by me...
ReplyDelete@Paper Boy,
ReplyDeleteYeah. I agree. I'm checking other options, too.
Mike M.
What do you say to Euroresidentes?
ReplyDeletehttp://blogger-ftp.blogspot.com/2010/01/deprecating-ftp.html?showComment=1264421658925#c762018713237441851
I teach as an adjunct at a university, and I've used Blogger to produce blogs for my courses for several years. This is unwelcome news and, to me, sudden news. I'm not ready to panic yet, and I will have a look at Custom Domains. However, I have some trepidation about hosting my class blogs outside of web space I own and control myself. I don't like this one bit, and I'll be giving some serious thought to the available options.
ReplyDeleteNo offense to anyone at Google, but I also would add that I am always highly skeptical anytime any service provider eliminates functionality and claims that it's absolutely necessary and all for my convenience. I'm sure there are technical issues I don't understand, but I don't see how a providing the option to publish a blog via FTP could possibly be such a big problem. Maybe I'm being overly suspicious, but I do wonder why else Google wants my data hosted on their servers. To be blunt, I'm not sure I trust my class blog files to Google's servers. As I said, I'm going to be giving this some serious thought.
I do not understand why Google is terminating existing FTP blogging services. Why not simply remove the FTP/SFTP option from new blogs while maintaining current support for existing FTP blogs?
ReplyDeleteAt the very least, why doesn't Google release an open source blogging tool (either web-based or standalone) that allows current FTP bloggers to continue to maintain their sites?
Giving less than two months formal warning to current Google bloggers that their publishing service will be cut off unless they migrate their blogs to Google's servers is a lot like placing a gun to our heads. This is one of the more "evil" things Google has ever done.
I, too, will be leaving Blogger's service because of this change. Google's weakness is that it's spread too thin. Hopefully I don't have too many blog defacings when I switch to Wordpress.
ReplyDeleteThe constant captcha requirement on comments, settings changes, or picking my nose was already getting to me. This is the final nail in the proverbial coffin.
If we were to add up all the subscriber fees that bloggers have paid to Google for FTP Blogger access, the total money would be...
ReplyDeleteHmmm... I need to recheck my math. The number I came up with is zero.
All the same, I DEMAND A REFUND and SO SHOULD YOU!
We'll see how Google Almighty cowers when faced with the prospect of paying zero dollars in restitution!
Oops. 3:00. Time for my medication.
What about logging? My custom domain lets me have access to the raw w3c log files. Will you allow that? Google Analytics does not allow access to the specific IP address of visitors.
ReplyDeleteI find it pretty difficult to believe that FTP access is difficult to maintain. You say that a small percentage of users use FTP. But what is the percentage of activity?
Rick, have a few of us on Facebook chatting about this and I think there is some confusion. Are the FTP blogs that will no longer be available the "myname.blogspot.com" blogs or the blogger is hosting www.myname.com/blog" ???
ReplyDeleteSad news. Glad I moved on to Wordpress.
ReplyDeletePlease detail the steps to move the entire blog to wordpress. Some steps provoding this would be helpful because using a custom domain is not an option for me. Thanks.
ReplyDeleteI'll be looking for another way to run my blog - I want my blog on my domain (owned by me), hosted on a server owned/rented by me...
ReplyDeleteWell I sucessfully migrated to a custom domain after getting the email from Blogger. It was pretty painless and I have set up a mod rewrite rule on the old server to redirect all the old posts with 301 redirects. I posted about the process here.
ReplyDeleteObviously there are worries about losing search engine listings for individual posts as all the backlinks will go to the old addresses. Hopefully the redirects will be enough to sort it out.
My migration was more complicated because I also wanted to move my blog to a different Google log in so I had to backup in one account and restore in the other. At least that's me got rid of my old Blogger log in
The only missing function I have is the social bookmarking part of my old template which will need to be rewritten. Is there not a widget for this that can be added to the post template?
Ugh... after a 7 year relationship with blogger they tell me they don't love me anymore less than 2 weeks before valentines day.
ReplyDeleteI've been using picasa, blogger, and many other services because of the ease of use and the ability that Google gave me to control my data but I guess it's said that all good things come to an end and this appears to be what is happening. I've wanted, for a long time, to just set up Joomla and do EVERYTHING on my server but Blogger just made my life so much easier.... Maybe this is just the push I needed?
Either way, I have to seriously question putting ANY of my content up on any google services anymore as I have seriously been hurt and disappointed by this announcement. It's obvious the motive here is that Google wants to be in control of everyone's content which is why they no longer want us having our content on our own servers -- exactly what I've argued to people that Google never seemed interested in. Worst in this whole scenario is that Blogger/Google is primarily hurting the users that have been with Blogger the longest -- users that have stuck by Blogger in the days when it was issue after issue. Obviously the issues are ironed out and we no longer matter.
I am not particularly computer savvy and I am none the wiser about what I have to do. All I have is promises there will be a migration tool - but that will be three of the seven weeks notice Google have bothered to give us gone. So we have four weeks to do as Google demand or cease functioning. Why the mad rush. Is profit that vital?
ReplyDeleteMy experience is the help given by Google is often confusing and anything but helpful. Is there any reason things will be different this time?
This annoys me considering that I have 2 years remaining on my server contract. Thanks Blogger (note the sarcasm). I've been publishing this way since 2006 and I am NOT tech savvy at all and I have no idea how to deal with this crap.
ReplyDeleteCan anyone suggest an alternative provider for the service being arbitrarily withdrawn? And how easy will it be to migrate things away from Google's control or will I have to start again?
ReplyDeleteThanks
Well, that's it for me, then. Over the 4 years and over 400 posts (and well over 300,000 podcast media downloads) of my blog's existence, I've had to use my own database and programming skills in order to create a well-rounded blog experience -- making up for manifold limitations and shortcomings in the Blogger engine.
ReplyDeleteThat customization is fundamentally interwoven with the existing Blogger structure.
If I had known that Blogger would be removing this key feature I would have *never* invested the time and effort involved in establishing a busy Blogger based blog.
Once again, Google has significantly fumbled in accomodating their customers.
I was once excited to see Google -- which I admired greatly -- expanding into other facets of the web biz. But, over and over, I have been disappointed by incomplete, partially functional, or just downright buggy services -- sometimes but not always floated under the supposed fig leaf of being a "beta" (sometimes in "beta" for many years at a time, in fact).
But *this* is particularly disturbing, since it undercuts years of effort in building up my blog and the infrastructures that *I* had to add in.
No wonder so many people have adopted the far more flexible and powerful WordPress model for their blogging efforts.
And no wonder so many people are turning their backs on slipshot web apps from Google.
Hey, fellow bloggers --
ReplyDeleteAre you mad that the efforts you've taken to establish your blog (and so helping to further Google web hegemony) are being thrown back in your face?
Do NOT suffer in silence: you have the perfect platform to air your grievances -- your blog!
Until, of course, it's shut down by the clueless giant, Google.
I think anyone who had struggled with FTP publishing over the past year would have seen this coming. I certainly did and I looked into switching over the Christmas holidays.
ReplyDeleteI think the direct publishing is better for what I use Blogger for (as a blog rather than as a publishing tool for a larger web presence).
I suppose I have got off lightly because I had very few customisations - some of which were mimicking widgets I couldn't use on FTP publishing so its been an easy move for me. We shall see what happens as time goes on.
I do feel for the Chinese people though as its not going to be easy for them.
One upside is that its finally allowed me to kill off my old Blogger ID so that I don't have to log out of Gmail in order to log into Blogger.
I have a reasonable amount of skill, but my entire migration other than the google analytics code was done through the Blogger web interface with no html involved at all. And that was without the migration tool. With the assistance of a tool it should be even easier.
FWIW, the blog attached to this ID is not my primary. That is www.AYearOfSongs.org -- just so people don't go to my rather small political blog looking for those 400 posts mentioned several posts back.
ReplyDeleteJust a quick response to Jonathan E. Quist:
ReplyDeletePlease, just because Blogger isn't subscription based doesn't mean that Google doesn't make money from Blogger users. And just because Blogger users aren't out any money doesn't mean there isn't legitimate cause for some complaint.
Oddly enough, your flippant dismissal of everyone's concerns does support one of my main issues with this change. Currently, I pay for the space where my blogs are hosted. Because I pay for it, I have some rights. Now, if I stay with Blogger, I'll be forced to use Google's servicers, and because I don't pay them, they can change the rules and do anything they like with my contenct. That bothers me, and that's why I'm considering other options.
This will ALSO mess up the blogs of several of my clients. I had *thought* I was doing them a favor by going with a once-respected and trusted third party provider. Now I find that I will either have to ask them to pony up for my mistake in 'partnering' with Google -- or, more likely -- I will have to simply eat all the costs of reintegrating new blog support into their existing sites.
ReplyDeleteYou can BET that I will *not* make the mistake of depending on Google ever again.
I mirror what RLP wrote: I pay for my own hosting because I prefer to host/retain ownership/have control over my content. I hate to go after 5+ years (and after dealing with all the other bugs and issues which I've worked around or ignored) but killing FTP is a dealbreaker for me.
ReplyDelete@Studio13 Any blogs whose URL is at blogspot.com are *NOT* FTP blogs. To verify your blog is (or is not) publishing via FTP, simply go to Settings | Publishing.
ReplyDelete@Gordon Thanks for sharing your experiences, glad you're excited about catching up to the new speed/features of Blogger that we haven't been able to share with FTP users for several years.
@KS2 I appreciate your frustration, and trust me, we did not arrive at this decision lightly. Almost all of the development work on Blogger over the last several years has been on a platform we felt we could reliably support, build new functionality, and deliver the experience that users expect out of Google. Over the last year, it's become increasingly clear that that was not possible with FTP, largely for reasons out of our control. As noted in this original announcement, we recognize that this is troubling for many users, and we're doing everything we can to provide a number of options - which admittedly include moving to another platform. While we don't want to lose users, we understand that there may be things they need us to do which we cannot continue to support - so we make the data portable, and provide the tools to convert that data into formats that are useful to those platforms.
Wow. This is not even *close* to enough warning. Dammit.
ReplyDeleteNow I find myself pondering why I would continue to pay my host domain provider if all my blog files are going to be on Google's servers. Pay a monthly fee just to hold a domain name that points to Google?
ReplyDeleteWithout getting into why the venerable FTP protocol should or shouldn't be problematic for Blogger to administer, the idea of removing *ANY* option to place / possess one's Blogger-tool generated content ANYWHERE BUT on Google's proprietary server(s), seems rather heavy handed.
ReplyDeleteThis is especially dismaying to those of us who have built up a large legacy of many years of Blogger use, and are now on pretty short notice in the context of having to completely reinvent our blogging presence from square one.
What ever happened to "Don't be evil."?
I've been using Blogger for about nine years and publishing with FTP for at least five years (probably more)... two months notice for discontinuation is absolutely not long enough.
ReplyDeleteI have quite a few blogs to migrate, including some built for friends and clients, and frankly guys I have a day job and can't just drop everything to work on sorting this out.
Seriously, two months? Less than two months if you didn't happen to notice a blog post? For a service that's been running for years!?
You must have known months ago that you were going to do this, in fact I'd guess you'd decided way back when the "ftp is hard" post went out last year. Giving us just a few weeks is just nasty, or poor communications, or both.
Please give us some more breathing room.
Hey Rick, first of all thanks for your efforts in helping people get through this. If discontinuing FTP will free up resources for the Blogger team to add new features, then I'm all for it. So many times I've been tempted to switch to WP but I just love Blogger and can't wait to see what new stuff you've got for us.
ReplyDeleteAnyways, I never used FTP but my roommate does for his blog. He chose that route for good reasons:
He controls the content, got rid of the navbar, and never has to worry about his blog being "flagged" or shut down by Google. To put it simply, security.
I know it's easy to remove the navbar on any blog, but now with this change will it actually become an option to do so (for all custom domain users at least)? Or will people be forced to remove it themselves and feel like some sort of Google criminals? Many people would pay a small monthly fee for both security of content and no branding. (In fact I've been wishing for a "premium" blogger service, maybe for a few bucks a month, and it could also include some file hosting, etc)
Just curious what the new Official Blogger stance is going to be now because the option to turn off the navbar was a BIG selling point for FTP. I also love Blogger and proudly use it for my sites, hosted by Google, and I display the "I Power Blogger" button happily. But if the navbar was mandatory I would never have built sites on Blogger!
Best regards from Vancouver, home of the 2010 Olympics, and keep up the hard work.
Yeah, this is really very short notice. Honestly, if it were a couple months later, it'd make for a neat April Fools' gag, but as it is, it's just really tacky.
ReplyDeleteGrr! I just transfered from WordPress. Just my luck!
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteWow, you've pulled the rug from under myself, a public garden (www.cerneygardens.com), a musician and a photgrapher - all small local businesses for whom I've set up quick and easy ways to update an online diary.
ReplyDeleteGood work Google / Blogger, great to see the takeover of Pyra Labs has yield such progress. I put my trust in Blogger over numerous other free competitors and faced with days of migration work now regret the decision.
I feel particularly sorry for my fellow Chinese bloggers, who will lose a key communication channel due to the blocking of Blogspot/Blogger.com. It really makes a mockery of Google's grandstanding on China last month.
I an VERY disappointed at the short notice.
ReplyDeleteNot professional.
I use several team blogs as a CMS for a website, all of which will have to be replaced
What is you decide to discontinue google app-engine with only 6 weeks notice
Does the Google hosted domain also include email, or just web hosting? I use my domain for emails too.
ReplyDeleteWell, for the record, this will mean the end of me using Blogger. Since my blogs aren't very big and I always used the archive function, it's not as big a problem for me, but it's still very frustrating. I've been using it (and publishing with FTP) since 2002 to update and keep news posted on several sites because it was easy, quick, and I could do so from one central location. I basicly just send the news posts themselves without any layout formatting, which works great for me since I tend to change layouts frequently. All the formatting was handled on the server side, and I could run any scripts I wanted to without a problem. Now, without being able to use FTP, that's pretty much it for me for Blogger. It was handy to have everything in one spot, but the Custom Domain option won't work for me, and judging by the comments above, won't work for pretty much every person that used FTP. Which is why we've been using it.
ReplyDeleteIf you ever bring it back, I'll probally come back because it is handy. But I'm not able to use my site with any options you allow anymore, so there's no point in staying around.
Woeful, I can only hope they make a quick reversal of there decision as my site isn't just a blog it is so much more (however I have always liked the blog on the front page), so I can't use a custom domain easily.
ReplyDeleteI have been using google since 2000, and blogger since before it was owned by Google. If this goes through I will transfer everything away, mail, web and search.
This is against there motto, and an evil underhanded "embrace, extend and exstinguish" that we usually see from their competitiors.
I have blogged about Google's indefensible and unprofessional decision here:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.vanshardware.com/2010/02/google-kills-bloggers.html
I am as mad with google as possible especially since i am a non-technical person. all i want to know is what is the best way to transfer my blog to word press or some other service. Most likely the folks at blogger wont help, so I request somebody to post suggestions on moving blogs over to word-press.
ReplyDeleteWeird. Either FTP/SFTP works, or it doesn't. I'm not completely understanding your noting the "engineering resources devoted to supporting FTP"... It's worked for me, other than the occasional "this is taking longer than expected" error (which was never accurate, by the way. Our blog was always updated just fine).
ReplyDeleteMy point is similar to some of those mentioned above: There are significant reasons - mostly related to usability and user-experience - which are probably behind 0.5% of your users wanting a blog that could be seamlessly integrated with their existing websites.
Our blog is simply an enhancement to an existing corporate website, integrated such that visitors don't have to click back and forth between sub-domains.
I would have MUCH preferred if Google could have at least provided a new S/FTP support under some sort of paid plan. Businesses are willing to pay for services that meet their needs and requirements. My requirement is to host a blog within our existing site structure.
I really appreciate the free service and all, but now I'm stuck - unless I can format and XML version of the blog posts. More programming. Not an easy solution for me. Ugggg...
THINGAMABLOG.COM
ReplyDeleteFree - FTP Publishing! Like Blogger but free standing...works!
There's one big reason why I chose to host my own blog posts and I haven't seen it mentioned yet:
ReplyDeleteIf you host with Google, then they can claim certain rights to your photos, videos and text! By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through Google services which are intended to be available to the members of the public, you grant Google a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, publish and distribute such Content on Google services for the purpose of displaying and distributing Google services.
That's the primary reason why I chose to host my blog elsewhere!
@Sheldon That's not us claiming any ownership (our Terms of Service explicitly state that you own the content you create), it's simply an acknowledgement that we need the right to distribute the content that we host on your behalf.
ReplyDeletegoodbye blogger, hello wordpress.. bonehead move google..
ReplyDeleteI'm pretty sure that bloggers who deliberately use FTP to publish represent way more than 0.5% of blogs worth reading (that is, reporting on more than Britneys whereabouts, photos from the last drinking binge, and what happend on Big Brother last night).
ReplyDeleteSome of the names I used on Blogspot have been taken over by others since I switched to FTP - clever move to allow that to happen, too (like "aniwaniwa.blogspot.com" - was mine, now somebody else sits on that)...
I guess I will have to look into Wordpress, like so many others.
I have a few questions (Sorry if answered earlier)
ReplyDelete1) How will google (and other search engines that I am told exist) find the blog entries that previously were on my site?
2) If a blog keyword creates a high ranking - will that be preserved across the transfer to custom domains?
3) Will the loss of keywords within the blog alter the ranking of other pages on teh site?
Thanks
I think what google have forgotten is that yes it may only be 0.5% that use the FTP functionality but... if you have actually gone to the trouble of using FTP then you are more than likely a serious blogger or have intergrated a blog into an existing web site.
ReplyDeleteCompare this to many silly easily hosted blogs on the google servers which are started by people looking for quick buck and soon abandoned.
The ramifications of this are much more than the 0.5% figure quoted.
And the solution? There is none for any one who has integrated their blog into an existing site. To simply suggest creating a new sub domain is ridiculous given that most people will have added a blog to their site in an effort to increase their SEO rankings. By splitting this out, Google by their own admission, will treat the main domain (www.example.com) as a SEPARATE web site to the subdomain (blog.example.com)!
So bang goes many hours of SEO work!
Why on earth not just keep the FTP running and do no new development on it is beyond me. Having not been aware of this move until the email this week I glad I have just set up yet another FTP blog with blogger only a couple of weeks ago!
I can't hotfoot across to WordPress quick enough!
So long Blogger!
Does Google honestly expect the savvy users of Blogger to believe that a billion dallar company suddenly is unable to handle basic File Transfer Protocol?
ReplyDeleteGet real, and NO, I'm not TRUSTING google with my content.
So, i will leave Blogger after nearly 10 years. FTP to static HTML-Pages was the only killer-app you had and the reason i never changed because my blog never went down when an article has been slashdotted.
ReplyDeleteEverything else works better on every other system anyways.
And about moving to Google-hosted: Make an educated guess, why we have choosen Blogger FTPing to our own servers in the first place. So thanks, but no thanks. Really. This sucks so big time, that i will have a look at every Google-service i use and see if theres a better alternative for it.
We all know that this is not a technical problem here (as Global Status Reporter kindly explains). Never mind and have fun with all these SEO-Spam blogs you seem to find more important to support than the serious bloggers.
And well, perhaps it was time to switch to a real Blogging system anyways...
Dear Google:
ReplyDeleteI have used Blogger for 11+ years as the text content engine to my website. I used Blogger before Google owned Blogger, and the original product was so much better than what you have turned it into.
Blogger was originally designed as a content management tool, not just for vanilla blogs, but for people who needed a way to manage all kinds of published content.
I would have happily paid for such a service over the years, but you never asked for anything other than a link advertising Blogger at the bottom of my pages. At no time did you tell me that supporting a basic functionality of the Internet - FTP - was costing you more money than you made back from me.
All of my pages are indexed at Google, with .asp extensions - with a PageRank befitting my little piece of the web. Your replacement product will no longer support my website, its design and structure, or my purposes. Even if I migrate my content, all of my links will be changed, and I will no longer be able to customize my content programatically.
You've also given me less than two months to migrate to new tools, effectively freezing my content until I find a new content management tool.
Thank you so much for caring so much about your customers, especially those who have been with you since the beginning.
If you should happen to run into the fun guys who originally made Blogger, could you ask them kindly to come back and re-deploy their original product, maybe under a new umbrella? I could really use a customizable content management system right about now.
Rick, I have a few files on my server (not many) that do not relate to my blog.
ReplyDeleteAs I understand, if I point my domain to blogger these other files will be inaccessible, right?
Can I move these files to google (i.e blogger) as well?
I have another question: what happens to my xml file that is spread around (I don't even know where by now) for updatings?
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately there is no way to get rid of the Navbar... so custom domains are not for professional bloggers....
ReplyDeleteIt's just a real pain boys, seriously.
ReplyDeleteUnbelievable situation.
whattt????? you have to display a navbar?
ReplyDeleteI've posted here a couple of comments critical of this move. I thought I would share what I've decided to do after checking out Custom Domains and looking at other options.
ReplyDeleteAs I mentioned, I teach at a university and have used Blogger to create blogs for my classes. I also have a personal blog.
For the moment, I've decided that I'll have to terminate the class blogs I've created on Blogger. There are serious intellectual property and university policy concerns that, in my case, I could address by publishing via FTP. Custom Domains simply doesn't address these issues to my satisfaction. I know the current terms of service are supposed to grant me ownership of my content, but there's nothing to stop Google from changing the terms again with little or no notice. I'd hate to wake up one morning and discover that I no longer own my class content because I missed a blog post or email from Google about it. I'm not sure my university would like it much either.
I will migrate my personal blog to Custom Domains, at least for the time being. I don't post anything important there, and since I've become more active on Facebook, I rarely update it anyway.
So, in my case, this move means that my junk content will stay on Blogger and my truly valuable content will go somewhere else.
We have been using blogger since 2004 and this announcement is most troubling. How much trouble is ftp publishing really causing Google? Maybe you can charge users a fee and continue to support bloggers that still need to use ftp?
ReplyDeleteSnip from Alard above
I don't want to fragment my content, scatter my users onto multiple sites, fragment my web statistics, remove my blog from my robust on-site search capability, cause search engines to direct our traffic to other-than-our main site, screw up our URL pathing methodology, etc, etc, etc, etc, complicate our navigation and maintenance, and so on.
@nmajh You do not need to split up your web stats. I used the same google analytics code on my new custom domain as I was using on the ftp hosted version of the blog. This was done yesterday and today hits for both domains are in the one analytics report. If I go to a specific blog post in the report and select "hostname" it shows the hits under the two different addresses.
ReplyDelete@RLP
ReplyDelete> So, in my case, this move means that my junk content will stay on Blogger and my truly valuable content will go somewhere else.
Since that will obviously be the case with most FTP-Blogs/Bloggers (1. why else should one use it that way? 2. Among these may be a much higher share of long running ones online.).
Gee, who knows what that's good for. Two things at least: Google hosted content will only create more insignificant data for Google and people like us learn to make decisions that lead to more independence.
What really is a pity: They seem to be in such a rush to solve the "Google is a dissident hideout"-problem mentioned in the first post here. But even this will lead to relay on people and groups that are really dedicated to the idea of the free and transparent word. Never trust a company on that.
I have been assimilated by the Blog Borg!
ReplyDeleteMy Solution.
Cheers,
Mike M.
Unfortunately I'm going to have to switch as well -- I'm using SSI to include output from Blogger in other pages (a similar position to those with server side scripting in their pages).
ReplyDeleteI'm not sore about the service being removed -- I understand that sometimes you need to make that kind of call -- but (effectively) terminating a service with less than two months notice isn't the way to leave a market with any kind of goodwill :(
I have another blogspot.com hosted blog which I sometimes include information from in another web site. However I do that using PHP rather than SSI so that I can parse in the bit of page I want displayed. I am not sure how an FTP published blog would be easier to include in another page as its still html and therefore machine readable.
ReplyDeleteNot sure what the Blogger TOS says about screen scraping though!
@Phil: As explained in the migration tool overview, we will use rel="canonical" links to inform search engines that the content has moved URLs. There will be no impact on search discovery. (If you want to do the migration manually, you can use htaccess to do 301 redirects, which will have the same net effect.)
ReplyDelete@Global Status Reporter: It's not a matter of us not knowing how to support FTP. It's us being dependent on the thousands of downstream ISPs our users rely on. ISPs who often implement undocumented locks on FTP ports without notifying users (who then tell us that Blogger's broken because we aren't updating their blog), or the FTP protocol not providing any feedback when transfers fail, leaving us unaware of what did/didn't get published. (Necessitating a full republish, just to be safe - which is time-consuming, and likely to fail again unless underlying issues are fixed.) We know our users expect a superior experience from us, and the reality was (as we documented last year) it was getting increasingly impossible to deliver to that standard because of these issues.
@Noga: You can't upload arbitrary files to your Blogger-hosted domain, but we do have a solution for that. I'll be posting about our "missing files host" today that goes into more detail about that.
@Michael, Noga: Displaying the navbar is not required. You may hide it using CSS.
@Gordon: you're free to retrieve the contents of a page however you like, or you may use our API to pull post contents.
Did you start a war or what? My latest post is not being published through ftp... or is it March 27 already?
ReplyDeleteOK, here is how I include the content of blog posts in another web page using PHP:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.ecalpemos.org/2010/02/including-content-from-blogger-posts-in.html
Now the post appears on its permalink but not on the home, what happened?
ReplyDeletewww.noga.blog.br
http://www.noga.blog.br/2010/02/nao-se-pode-ser-feliz.html
Please advise!
@Global Status Reporter: It's not a matter of us not knowing how to support FTP. It's us being dependent on the thousands of downstream ISPs our users rely on. ISPs who often implement undocumented locks on FTP ports without notifying users (who then tell us that Blogger's broken because we aren't updating their blog), or the FTP protocol not providing any feedback when transfers fail, leaving us unaware of what did/didn't get published. (Necessitating a full republish, just to be safe - which is time-consuming, and likely to fail again unless underlying issues are fixed.) We know our users expect a superior experience from us, and the reality was (as we documented last year) it was getting increasingly impossible to deliver to that standard because of these issues.
ReplyDeleteYes, but there are many many grown ups who do know how ftp works and would pay for a premium grandfathered paid basis.
I am not moving my files to your servers. I prefer to use blogger for publishing, not for hosting.
Do you know of any Mac compatible blogging software that enables me to post directly to my server?
I am extremely upset by this development. I have nearly 30 clients running Blogger on subpages, often PHP pages, and it is simply not possible for me to convert them all in the short time frame provided. What's worse, I can't imagine any of these clients are going to be willing to pay for "fixing" their blogs, because they will only see it as "my problem".
ReplyDeleteMost of these blogs are just part of a website, i.e. CompanyName.com/news.php, or ElectPerson.com/mythoughts.htm, etc. The whole point of my using Blogger was that it was so easy to set up as simply a subpage of an established site. NONE of my client sites are "just blogs", and often there's a different blog for separate subpages on each account, such as blog.php, news.php, upcomingevents.php, etc -- all on the same site. I highly doubt blogger's "migration" tool will be able to migrate any of my blogs (which all publish to a specific filename, like blog.htm, NOT a directory).
This will cost me thousands and thousands of dollars, and possibly even clients, who will not understand at all, and I'll get the full blame, not Google.
Please reconsider this. Even if it's made a paid option, or grandfathered in, or something. This is a disaster for some of us.
After 10 years I have to say goodbye to blogger. That's a long time to have been running a blog, but my blog is merely a part of my site, a part of my main page, which uses SSI to have two blogs plus other content. Not to mention the other blog buried elsewhere on the site. Obviously using the custom domain option just isn't going to work and I am going to have to look for an alternative.
ReplyDeleteI think it's quite sad, as a significant number of those using ftp must be long-term users of blogger, and a good proportion of those will probably have helped pay for the development during the blogger pro time. I know I did.
I understand the reasons, but guys, this is dreadfully short notice.
If I bulk up a year's content and pre-"schedule" blog posts will they post after the deadline using FTP?
ReplyDeletePlease offer an HTML cut and paste workaround so I can add new pages to my blogs manually to my server. Then I would just ping manually.
@Strada No, that will not work.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
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ReplyDelete@Rick: Seriously, 2 months is a ridiculously short time frame for dealing with this change. You're forcing people to scramble for alternative solutions to a mission-critical function, and you're only giving 8 weeks? That's not just burning bridges, that's dropping a bomb on these soon-to-be-former customers.
ReplyDeleteBut hey, if they're leaving anyway what's the harm of giving them a hard kick in the rear on the way out?
This is Sad,
ReplyDeleteI was a blogger user, as I hosted my ASP.NET pages from Google FTP hosting, Now after 7 Years, I am saying good bye to blogger.com
This comment has been removed by the author.
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ReplyDeleteIt's february, where is the migration tool? because I can work out how to do this and still have my blog appear as a subdomain of my website.
ReplyDeleteI can't get my head around PHP blogging platforms. (Don't tell me to "experiment" till I get it -- tried that already numerous times).
ReplyDeleteBlogger was the only place I could actually have a blog AND use FTP.
So now what? I guess I'll just have to kiss my website goodbye.
Thanks for another headache.
Well, that stinks to high heaven. Another serious fail in Google's customer service. Like so many others here, I actually use my domain for, you know, other domain-y things besides my blog. The Custom Domains nonsense is a non-starter. Besides, if you guys can't handle ftp, why would I trust you to host my files?
ReplyDeleteLooks like time to install Wordpress. Sigh.
@Mark You can have a blogger custom domain blog use a subdomain of your existing domain without changing the hosting of any of the other services associated with that domain. You just have to set up cname records. Its potentially the easiest way of moving to a hosted blog as www.domain.com/blog would become blog.domain.com.
ReplyDeleteI do get the point people are making that those of us with domains can set up a sub-domain to move our blogs onto the custom domains with Blogger, but that's likely not going to satisfy people who use FTP with their own domains.
ReplyDeleteMy blogs have the same template as the rest of my site. I want my blogs to have the same template, it helps with the unified look of the site.
With this "solution", I either have to suffer a Blogger template for the blogs, with the rest of my site looking different, OR I have to abandon my own template and adapt it to the Blogger one. Any solution would be a fudge that would just underscore that my blog was somehow not fully under my own control anymore, and technically no longer part of my site, and that is one of the reasons I cannot accept the custom domains as a solution, and why I have to leave.
I'll also reitterate a point I made in my first comment, and that I have seen others make.
Those using FTP may be only 0.5% of Blogger users by number, but by activity and value we must be a higher percentage. I have come across any number of empty Blogspot blogs, or ones that are merely linkfarms, scams, malware sites etc (I'm currently serving a DMCA notice on one such Blogspot site that has plagiarised the content of my wife's site - something Blogger is actively impeding I might add...).
Because of this decision, Blogger will see a lot of businesses, academics, writers, and high value bloggers leave, taking their content with them. Blogger will have 0.5% less blogs, and about 50% less value, worth and interest.
Dear Blogger, am sorry but I am confused how to do what you describe.
ReplyDeleteMy blog is ftp'd to www.excitant.co.uk/blog/blog.htm
I am reasonably technical but fail to understand how I persuade blogger to post to (say) myblog.excitant.co.uk. I also don't understand what will happen to any previous link to the blog or for that matter a link to a specific post.
Will this use of cname and aname work to automatically re-direct such links to the subdomain?
Am I missing something here?
Thanks
Phil
First of all, thank you providing us the ability to FTP our blog content to our own webservers until now.
ReplyDeleteSecondly, storing my blog content on my webserver is importatnt to me so I guess it's time for me to move to another blog service or software.
-Kobi.
@Rick Klau
ReplyDeleteI don't think the custom domains option is going to work for me as my hosting package uses CPanel and there is no way for me to modify DNS entries.
I'm tied into this package so it isn't something I can change easily without changing hosts/paying extra, which isn't an option.
Basically, I have a website e.g. mydomain.co.uk which contains various content and it has two blogs off of it; mydomain.co.uk/blog and /news both published via FTP.
Is there anyway for me to setup these custom domains without having access to DNS? The host is going to want more money off me for that.
It's sad because it took me a long time to create custom blogger templates to exactly match my website and I use Buzz Boost too display extracts from my blogs on my websites home page.
If there is any way for me to continue using Blogger I would love to, but it doesn't sound like there is.
David
Hi, Rick
ReplyDeleteI recently finished my migration with no problems whatsoever. I recommend it.
If you want to refer to a post in Portuguese about the experience of migrating, here goes the link:
http://www.noga.blog.br/2010/02/atraso-de-vida.html
Thanks!
Rick:
ReplyDelete1) Too little notice!
2) As many others have noted, the net result you describe is quite bad for those of us who have websites beyond our blogs.
and
3) Your technical advice for fixes is, well, too technical. Plenty of us chose Blogger because it meant we didn't have to *know* the technical details. Many of us are utterly unprepared to deal with this.
Chris.
Hi all - just noting that the FAQ is updated, addressing a number of recent questions raised on this and other posts.
ReplyDeleteI've created a entry to help rewrite Blogger URLs: http://www.rsreese.com/2010/02/redirect-blogger-url-using-mod-rewrite.html
ReplyDeleteIt's not perfect but I hope it helps someone.
Stephen, that's the kind of technical solution that's beyond many of us.
ReplyDeleteI had a question about interstitials. If it's determined by Google that a blog is a "spam blog" or should be "flagged" an interstitial cannot be placed before FTP based blogs.
However, if a blog is hosted on Google servers and is flagged, Google will place an interstitial and there's no way around having to get a "review" of the site by Google staff.
Is that correct?
Well I guess I am among the list of users who will be examining other options at this point.
ReplyDeleteI had used blogger as an easy way to get into a blog when I was on a service that did offer a good database strategy in which to utilize the alternative
Millions of page views later I found out I picked the wrong horse to bet on. I had been looking for an excuse to switch to wordpress but did not want to bite off the work of converting especially sense I want to keep all the old static links. (Several of my posts have become perma linked as tutorials for some big name companies and I wish those users to continue to be able to retrieve that information)
Maybe this will be a move in the right direction.
Either way goodby blogger.
Like others on here I hope you evaluated the activity of this .5% user base you chose to alienate I have a feeling they may have been some of the bigger content contributers and with higher than average views.
@Strada Travel: Correct.
ReplyDeleteI wanted to post this up somewhere so that people who are moving away from Blogger know there are options out there that will work for you, just depends on how you want to set it up.
ReplyDeleteSince the inital announcement, I tried both Thingamablog and b2evolution. TAMB is based on your computer, b2evo is installed on your server. I wanted to throw both of those out there for the any that are migrating away from Blogger because of this changeover. I tried both of them, and with some configuring, I was able to import all of my posts, with correct dates.
Blogger, thank you for the years I was able to use you, but your 'solution' won't work for me, and what looks like most of that .5%, all for various reasons. So thank you for the run, but it's time to move on to something better than what you're turning into.
I have a question related to Jon on Feb 2, which i hope you will be able to answer soon (sorry if i missed seeing your reply).
ReplyDeleteJon said...
Does the Google hosted domain also include email, or just web hosting? I use my [current FTP] domain for emails too.
February 2, 2010 4:26 PM
Permlink at j.mp/d9vHCg
In particular, as i migrate my organization's FTP blog to a Custom Domain on Blogger, i would like to keep my organization's email address at the same (naked) domain name (domain.org) as our blog which uses www.domain.org and (naked) domain.org)
We use blogger as our SITE, not as a separate Blog, so rehosting our site to blog.domain.org is not desired.
How can we end up with our blog at www.domain.org and domain.org AND ALSO maintain our current mail service at domain.org on our existing host?
A related Naieve Question:
If the MX records (etc, whatever) are left alone during the migration, wouldn't our mail services remain at the same IP addresses for the our domain.org -- even as the CNAME and ANAME records point www.domain.or and domain.org
to blogger IPs for web hosting?
Thanks for whatever you can tell me and whatever Blogger can do to not disrupt our domain.org mail service during and after the migration to a Custom Domain on Blogger.
be well,
Hosting with Blogger via a CNAME has no effect on the MX records. Your e-mail delivery will not change (and it will not be routed through Google at all).
ReplyDeleteWe use FTP now and are looking at our options, but we are also going to be rebranding in 6 months and our domain name will be changing. If we decide to go from FTP to a custom domain (myblog.domain.org) will this effect when domain.org becomes newdomain.org? Would we just point myblog.newdomain.org to myblog.domain.org? Will we lose any of the old posts? From my understanding, we are just redirecting the new subdomain to the old subdomain.
ReplyDeleteIn trying to migrate a blog to a custom domain I am having trouble with the A name on 1and1. You list four ip addresses in teh in structions yet 1and1 only provides space for 1 Aname entry.
ReplyDeleteI don't know if this is why, when I click through to teh blog I get a 404 error.
Advice please
@Phil Jones: Unfortunately, you'll need to have all 4 A records on your DNS zone for naked domains to work properly.
ReplyDelete@Rick
ReplyDeleteso if 1and1 don't provide that, then I can't migrate my blog to the new style?
Ummm - that is a real nuisance.
I don't seem to have any options here...
@phil jones: Sorry to hear that. This isn't an unusual requirement, especially given our redundant server setup where users requesting a domain can get routed to one of several IPs. Without multiple A records, there's no way to guarantee that you'd hit the right IP (and if you could, that'd force you to be dependent on one data center, which would mean you wouldn't get the benefit of our server redundancy).
ReplyDelete@ Rick
ReplyDeleteI emailed 1and1 and their response was that I need to create FOUR Sun-domains - one for each IP address (see below). Will this work as a solution?
I doubt it because how do I know which siubdomain to point a user at? But do you know better?
They replied..."We would like to inform you that all you need to do is to create 4 subdomain names that would hold your 4 ip addresses. This 4 subdomain names will be then used as name servers of your main domain. Please refer to the information below.
A.) Creating subdomain: ns1.domain.com
http://faq.oneandone.co.uk/domains/sub_domains/2.html
B.) Pointing the IP address to the Subdomain:
http://faq.oneandone.co.uk/domains/dns_settings/11.html
C.) Used the subdomain for your main domain:
http://faq.oneandone.co.uk/domains/dns_settings/4.html"
@phil jones: That's not standard DNS setup, so I don't think it will work. I don't know why 1and1 would not support standard DNS config, but the proposed solution doesn't sound like it would accomplish what's needed.
ReplyDelete(Just to clarify - the A Name setup is for "naked domains" only - http://domain.com, as opposed to http://www.domain.com/. You're trying to do this for a naked domain, right? Not a subdomain like blog.domain.com?)
@rick
ReplyDeleteI might be up a gum tree as I don't (knowingly) use a naked domain. I currently have a domain www.excitant.co.uk and my blog is hosted in a folder (not sub-domain) beneath that.
So, following the guidelines, I assumed I would need a corresponding sub-domain...
to point the new custom domain towards...
I do feel like I have disappeared down a rabbit hole, facing the wrong way and now can't reverse out....
Why is this so difficult?
Phil
My domain people (Freeparking) cannot support the change from FTP, and without me having any kind of technical expertise, it's goodbye Blogger after eight years. What a shame.
ReplyDeleteRick - If I click 'Start migration now' on my dashboard and I land on the FTP Migration Dashboard, none of my blogs are listed at the top under 'FTP blogs'. It is blank, so there is no START button to press.
ReplyDeleteDoes this mean I have no FTP blogs, despite my dashboard (and my blog settings) telling me differently?
@Fat Roland: Please report this issue here and we'll look into it further.
ReplyDeleteCan the migration tool be reset?
ReplyDeleteBack button doesn't clear the previous entry!
After working for years to build my page rank and search engine rankings, I'm afraid to ask this question. But how will all of this be affected?
ReplyDeleteI also have Adsense on my sites. I'm sure I'm not the only one in this situation. Isn't Google screwing itself by doing this?
@Work at Home Mom: As mentioned in yesterday's release announcement, we use rel=canonical to ensure that no search rankings will be lost with the migration.
ReplyDeleteYour AdSense ads will not be affected by this move.
I am sorry, but 1 or 2 months is FAR too short notice. I have read some of the comments, and it seems to me that you are wrong: there is no doubt that you have underestimated (and you have, believe me) the impact of your decision on your users. That means that users of Unfriendly Blogger have to fit in extra hours of work (and for some ... many many many extra hours of work) in order to get out of your system before it is too late. And they have to do it NOW.
ReplyDelete6 months starting from now: _that_ would have been much much more USER FRIENDLY.
Moving to WordPress A.S.A.P.
I started the FTP migration for my blog (www.blendededu.com) and get the following message:
ReplyDelete"Another blog is already hosted at this address."
Huh?
@Derek - Please report this problem here. We'll get on it.
ReplyDeleteRick! I currently have my blog at www.gadgetboyz.net. I want to use the migration tool and keep that exact same address. Is this possible? The screen cast does not make it clear. Any help would be hugely appreciated.
ReplyDeleteJason
@Gadgetboyz - no, the migration tool does not handle that. I will have a blog post up next week that will document specifically what to do if you're moving from www.domain.com (FTP) to www.domain.com (custom domain). You can hold off until then.
ReplyDeleteThat's perfect Rick! Glad I waited! Will it be a fairly easy thing to do?
ReplyDeleteNote: Comments are closed on this post. Please direct general questions to the FAQ page, and specific problems with the migration tool to the issue tracker. More details about support for the FTP migration are here.
ReplyDelete