Skip to main content

What's Broken In FTP Publishing, This Week?

Blogs published using FTP have always offered interesting challenges for their owners, and for Blogger. The many selling points for Custom Domain publishing, as I recall, included the ability to
  • Publish to a Google server.
  • Have a blog with dynamic HTML and a Layouts template.
  • Have a non-BlogSpot URL.
  • Avoid the chronic instabilities of FTP publishing.


This week, we see a plethora of complaints about FTP publishing, in the forums.

What are the possibilities?
  1. It's your imagination that your FTP publishing is having problems.
  2. A lot of FTP server hosts are having problems.
  3. Blogger really broke something - big time.
  4. Blogger fixed a lot of non-FTP problems. What you see in the forums is a sudden lack of other complaints ("noise"), making the normal level of FTP publishing problems ("signal") more audible.
  5. FTP published blogs are typically produced by bloggers who spend more time at their computers. The climate improving in many parts of the USA has taken other bloggers away from their computers, causing a drop in "noise" in the forums.
  6. FTP published blogs are typically produced by bloggers who publish more. Larger blogs, published remotely, will eventually lead to more problems.
  7. Increasing popularity of custom domain publishing has drawn many smaller and more casual bloggers away from FTP publishing. Blogger, recognising this trend, is reallocating resources to custom domains, leading to decreased FTP publishing resources.
My personal opinion? I don't see Numbers 1, 2, and / or 3 as the sole causative factors. Numbers 5, 6, and 7 make more sense to me. I will go on record now
Anybody who believes that Blogger broke something, causing one single large problem, is part of the problem. As long as bloggers continue to complain about one large problem, the problem will never go away.


>> (Update 4/18): For an example of the seemingly random nature of FTP Publishing problems, look at this recently discovered detail about publishing to Yahoo Small Business.

>> Top

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Adding A Link To Your Blog Post

Occasionally, you see a very odd, cryptic complaint I just added a link in my blog, but the link vanished! No, it wasn't your imagination.

Embedded Comments And Main Page View

The option to display comments, embedded below the post, was made a blog option relatively recently. This was a long requested feature - and many bloggers added it to their blogs, as soon as the option was presented to us. Some blog owners like this feature so much, that they request it to be visible when the blog is opened, in main page view. I would like all comments, and the comment form, to be shown underneath the relevant post, automatically, for everyone to read without clicking on the number of comments link. And this is not how embedded comments work.

What's The URL Of My Blog?

We see the plea for help, periodically I need the URL of my blog, so I can give it to my friends. Help! Who's buried in Grant's Tomb, after all? No Chuck, be polite. OK, OK. The title of this blog is "The Real Blogger Status", and the title of this post is "What's The URL Of My Blog?".