The Anonymous Widower

Blogger Abandons FTP

I use Blogger to create news pages within web sites.  This approach is good as it enables anybody to update the news without disturbing the actual web site.  It also has advantages in that as Blogger updates the search engines directly, any changes are reflected immediately.

In most of the sites, I have used FTP to update the blogs, but Blogger have recently announced that FTP support will be discontinued.

I had felt this would be a problem, but if you look at my stud web site, Freedom Farm, you’ll now see that it uses a standard blogspot address, freedomfarmnews.blogspot.com. 

The web site works as well as before, but I’m afraid it’s lost all it’s search engine history, so I’ll have to grow the blog from start again.  I suspect too, that because the web site is now hosted on a different url to the news, that the two will not work as well together.  That is probably a good reason to use WordPress for a combination of a web site and news.  

But if you want still keep to Blogger, there wasn’t too many problems.

1. I had to change all of the links, but this was a global edit in the web site and a few changes to the template.
2. By default you get the Blogger NavBar, which is annoying in a web site.  However there is a patch to put in the template to remove it.  The details are here.

But otherwise it was painless.

I wouldn’t use Blogger again for this purpose, as it’ll probably degrade the search engine performance significantly, as the link between the web site and news are broken.

February 12, 2010 Posted by AnonW | Computing | Blogger, Blogging, Internet | Leave a comment