The Real Blogger Status

One sign of confusion, seen occasionally in Blogger Help Forum: How Do I? , involves the use of FTP - and options for updating our blogs. How do I publish my posts using an FTP desktop program? and How do I upload a custom home page (sitemap, .htaccess, etc)? People who are used to publishing a website see these options as a normal feature in any website maintenance process. Blogger, however, is a blogging platform - and provides none of these options.

Some Blogger blog owners have been confused about the role of FTP, in the Blogger world, for some time. Here's yet another instance where Blogger is different from many other website hosting services, on the Internet. With many website hosting services, you develop (and even debug / test) a website offline, then upload it to the hosting service, using File Transfer Protocol . That's what FTP is - a network protocol for moving files from computer to computer. And a website is a bunch of files. Blogger provides an online development and test environment. With Blogger, you create your entire website using Post Editor and accompanying utilities ("Settings", "Template Editor", etc). When you're done, your website is there, hosted in Google. No need for using FTP, to upload a website , after you created it.

Occasionally, it appears as if not all blog owners have gotten the message, just yet. For the record, here's my statement. FTP Publishing ended, in March 2010 . If you have a blog that is hosted externally, that you used to publish using FTP Publishing, your only option is to migrate to BlogSpot, or to Custom Domain Publishing . If you're interested in the search engine reputation, which is the product of most well maintained blogs with any history, you'll want to carefully consider the several options for migration . If you own a domain, and you have DNS control, then you can publish any Blogger blog to a non Blogger / Google URL, using custom domain publishing . >> Top

We see this query in the forums almost weekly I need the address for the Blogger FTP server. or How do I FTP my updates? or Why do I get nothing but FTPConnectionClosed when publishing? Coming from a normal web site publishing environment, you're used to composing your web site offline, then publishing the web site by sending the updates, using FTP, to the host server for the web site. That's similar to what you do with a Blogger blog, but with one major exception. When you use FTP to publish a blog, Blogger is the FTP client . There is no Blogger FTP server. You still use the plain old Blogger Post Editor (with one rare alternative ) to compose the posts. FTP Publishing under Blogger simply lets you publish the blog, instead of to BlogSpot, to a third party provided host server, outside the BlogSpot name and physical space. (Update 2010/03): And now, even FTP Publishing is no more . >> Top