So I was just surfing happily and then I received an email. Its subject line sent me to hell, back again, and to hell once more.
Important: Changes to Blogger FTP Service
Please don't tell me it's what I'm thinking. Please don't tell me it's what I'm thinking. Please don't tell me–
MY NIGHTMARE HAS CAME TRUE.
Read for yourself the damned email from Blogger.
Dear FTP user:
You are receiving this e-mail because one or more of your blogs at Blogger.com are set up to publish via FTP. We recently announced a planned shut-down of FTP support on Blogger Buzz (the official Blogger blog), and wanted to make sure you saw the announcement. We will be following up with more information via e-mail in the weeks ahead, and regularly updating a blog dedicated to this service shut-down here: http://blogger-ftp.blogspot.com/.
The full text of the announcement at Blogger Buzz follows. 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 March 26, 2010. We realize that this will not necessarily be welcome news for some users, and we are committed to making the transition as seamless as possible. To that end:
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
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
.
We have a number of big releases planned in 2010. While we recognize that this decision will frustrate some users, we look forward to showing you the many great things on the way. Thanks for using Blogger.
Regards, Rick Klau Blogger Product Manager Google 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View, CA 94043
This e-mail is being sent to notify you of important changes to your Blogger account.
Worst news I ever received on the www world, ever. (and how ironic is this – I am publishing this post via FTP)
I don't want to try Custom Domain because it totally mess up my blog the last time I tried. DNS is not something you can mess with just like that. And my blog was down for one whole week! So desperate at that time, I thought I have lost my blog forever. I also forced my Malaysian online friend to keep checking for me. IT'S A NIGHTMARISH EXPERIENCE.
But who am I to go against a giant like Google?
So I'm going to try this migration tool when it came out, and if I'm not happy or just mad desperate I'll move everything out. Only problem is, where to?
Can't I use the brownie points I score with Google to stay with FTP...?
OK, I know I haven't been a blogger for that long, only for 3 years but still, it's three years! And I have tried like other blogging platforms but I just can't think of using them because I (i) am stubborn; (ii) devoted to Google and (iii) think other blogging platform SUCKS.
