Blogger will stop supporting FTP publishing soon! If you publish your Blogger blog using FTP publishing to update your blog on your own domain name and your own hosting server, then it means you must tread carefully as it is going to affect your blogging habits, and maybe your blog URL too if you intend to continue publishing your blog.

The official Blogger blog announced that they will no longer support FTP publishing in Blogger after March 26, 2010. But why?

FTP remains a significant drain on our ability to improve Blogger: only .5% of active blogs are published via FTP — yet the percentage of our engineering resources devoted to supporting FTP vastly exceeds that. On top of this, critical infrastructure that our FTP support relies on at Google will soon become unavailable, which would require that we completely rewrite the code that handles our FTP processing.

Google has introduced custom domain names since 2007 and has often tried to explain the difference between Custom Domains vs. FTP. If you use Custom Domains, they can host your files and your blog url points to your domain instead of yourblog.blogspot.com – which combines the simplicity of Blogger, with scalability of Google hosting. But with FTP publishing, you actually upload the blog’s files to a your own web server hosted elsewhere. So now the choice is between a blogspot url or custom domain names only!

Is it the end of your blog? If you used FTP publishing to upload blog files to your own domain and hosting server, then its not yet over for your blog. They are building a migration tool that will help you migrate your blog from the current URL to a Blogger-managed URL which could be either a Custom Domain or a Blogspot URL. This tool will become live on February 22 and promises to redirect traffic from the old URL to the new URL. They have already set up a migration blog to which will soon post articles to help users through the migration.

I know this move will disappoint many Blogger users as I am aware of many blogs which FTP publish to popular domain names. In our early Blogger days, we too published several microblogs using FTP publishing to our own domain names and it was really easy to blog, especially since they allowed FTP publishers to remove Blogger navbar, which was good incentive.

But custom domains is becoming a popular way to blog with many blogging services like Tumblr, Posterous etc. and we also use these custom domain options in many services for better branding like on our job board, or photoblog. Custom domains help keeping your blog brand while making blogging easy, without any need for technical knowledge.

Do your FTP publish your Blogger blog… what is your plan? Image by Trying Youth under CC license