Blogger announced tonight via email the end of their support of FTP. I started this blog way back in August 2006 and have been happily FTP’ing to this domain a fairly constant stream of drivel ever since. From 26th March I won’t be able to do this any more.
Now, Blogger are offering me free hosting on a custom domain. I suppose I could redirect to that but, and here’s the rub, I have so much content, particularly images, that are hosted on my domain already with full paths in the posts that I fear an attempt at migration could be, erm, long, laborious and perhaps ultimately unsuccessful. Maybe I’ll see if their migration tool helps with this, maybe not.
This is a bit disappointing really. Although there is much not to admire about this blog, I was happy enough with it not to tinker too much and I had chunks of custom stuff ( like the random header images ) and category support. So, I’d stayed loyal to Blogger despite beseechings suggesting I do otherwise.
Now Blogger have forced me to do what I should have done a while back and migrate the whole thing to WordPress. This won’t be entirely pain free (although I’ve done one Blogger to WordPress migration and it went pretty well ) but it’s not something I have much time to do right now. I’m hoping all my absolute paths to pre-hosted content will work well for me. So, for a while, I guess there will be a bog-standard WordPress theme here soon until I get some time to tinker.
I’m sure the good people of Blogger won’t cry to lose me and I appear to be in a bit of a minority so perhaps it makes some sense that they can’t be bothered with me any more. I should thank them really, I think the WordPress version will ultimately be better.
I may have a go at punting another of my Blogger blogs across to a custom domain just to see what happens…
Same for me… apparently my 5 blogger sites join yours in the 0.5% of all blogger stuff… I had been meaning to migrate them over to wordpress as well.
I used to like blogger for its simplicity but looking at it now it has no advantage over wordpress…
Hey guys, fear not!
I made the leap from blogger to WP some time ago and can confirm it's a fantastic platform.
Very easy to use, and extremely flexible. There are many features already there you will use and wonder why you waited so long!
I’ve had it in the back of my head for years to switch from having my blogs at blogspot.com addresses to something in my personal domain using Blogger’s FTP feature. Never got around to it, I suppose out of an “if it ain’t broke (too badly), don’t fix it” mindset. Well, with this news, I see I put that task off long enough to make it irrelevant! (Every procrastinator’s dream, right?!) This does motivate me — a little — to try out the custom domain approach, though. No particular interest in WP at this point, given that Drupal is serving me relatively well for my personal site.