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Monday, February 08, 2010
Blogger FTP support going away
One very minor thing that's come up recently: Support for FTP publishing in Blogger is going away. Apparently, less than 1% of Blogger users publish via FTP. That's the method I've been using from the start, and I've just never changed. So now I'm going to have to. They're supposed to be releasing a conversion tool that will make it easy to switch to a Google Custom Domain, so I can keep the blog at andrewhuey.org, but I might have to do some finagling to redirect andrewhuey.org to blog.andrewhuey.org or something like that.
On a practical basis, it shouldn't be a big deal. On a philosophical basis, though, I'm wondering if I want to do this. Right now, all my content is stored at Google, of course, but published as HTML files under my 1&1 account. I can back them up easily, and if I ever decide to stop using Blogger, they don't go away -- I can keep my archives right where they are. If I switch to "custom domain" publishing, then my fqdn (say, blog.andrewhuey.org) will just point to Google's servers, and I need to rely on them to serve up the content. They *do* have export tools that can supposedly give me a snapshot of my entire blog, so I could then import it elsewhere, so maybe there's no practical problem with this. It just bothers me a bit that all my content will be in a database at Google and not fully under my control.
I may switch to WordPress. My host, 1&1, has the necessary support for WordPress (basically, PHP and MySQL), so I can install that, and have my blog completely under my control. All the data will be in a MySQL database that I can back up whenever I want, the logic will all be running on my own site, and I can pick it up and move it to another host whenever I want. And I guess another nice philosophical point is that WordPress is open source, so it won't matter if WordPress as a company goes away; I'll still have the code, running on my own site.
Of course, with everything that's going on right now, I'll probably just take the path of least resistance and go with the Google "custom domain" thing.
On a practical basis, it shouldn't be a big deal. On a philosophical basis, though, I'm wondering if I want to do this. Right now, all my content is stored at Google, of course, but published as HTML files under my 1&1 account. I can back them up easily, and if I ever decide to stop using Blogger, they don't go away -- I can keep my archives right where they are. If I switch to "custom domain" publishing, then my fqdn (say, blog.andrewhuey.org) will just point to Google's servers, and I need to rely on them to serve up the content. They *do* have export tools that can supposedly give me a snapshot of my entire blog, so I could then import it elsewhere, so maybe there's no practical problem with this. It just bothers me a bit that all my content will be in a database at Google and not fully under my control.
I may switch to WordPress. My host, 1&1, has the necessary support for WordPress (basically, PHP and MySQL), so I can install that, and have my blog completely under my control. All the data will be in a MySQL database that I can back up whenever I want, the logic will all be running on my own site, and I can pick it up and move it to another host whenever I want. And I guess another nice philosophical point is that WordPress is open source, so it won't matter if WordPress as a company goes away; I'll still have the code, running on my own site.
Of course, with everything that's going on right now, I'll probably just take the path of least resistance and go with the Google "custom domain" thing.
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