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?

It's your imagination that your FTP publishing is having problems.
A lot of FTP server hosts are having problems.
Blogger really broke something - big time.
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.
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.
FTP published blogs are typically produced by bloggers who publish more. Larger blogs, published remotely, will eventually lead to more problems.
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.

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Add A Custom Redirect, If You Change A Post URL

When you rename a blog, the most that you can do, to keep the old URL useful, is to setup a stub post , with a clickable link to the new URL. Yo! The blog is now at xxxxxxx.blogspot.com!! Blogger forbids gateway blogs, and similar blog to blog redirections . When you rename a post, you can setup a custom redirect - and automatically redirect your readers to the post, under its new URL. You should take advantage of this option, if you change a post URL.

Jump Break Is Visible Only In An Index Page

Some blog owners are unsure what a Jump Break looks like, when applied to their blogs. Occasionally, in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue , we see the confusion. Where's the Jump Break? or I added a Jump Break to several posts, but it never shows up! When asked for a screen print of what they're seeing, they may provide a image of the post, in the Post Editor Preview window - or possibly, the published post, but in post page view.

Leave Comments Here

Like any blogger, I appreciate polite comments, when they are relevant to the blog, and posted to the relevant article in the right blog . If you want to ask me a question thats relevant to blogging, but you can't find the right post to start with (I haven't written about everything blogger related, yet, nor the way things are going I don't expect to either), ask your questions here, or leave an entry in my guestbook . As noted above, please note my commenting policy . If you post a comment to this post , I will probably treat it as a "Contact Me" post . If you have an issue that's relevant to any technical issue in the blog, please leave a comment on the specific post , not here. This post is for general comments, and for non posted contact to me. If the form below does not work for you, check your third party cookies setting! For actual technical issues, note that peer support in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken , or Nitecruzr Dot Net - Bloggin...

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