Blogger changes its FTP rules

The announcement on the Blogger Buzz blog had the mild mannered title “An Important Note to FTP Users.”

To the bloggers who use Blogger FTP for their blogs, the news was more of a bombshell.

I switched from Blogger by FTP to WordPress several years ago. I wanted tags and categories and stand alone pages, none of which were available from Blogger at that time. BlogCoach just announced that You Can Now Add Pages to Your Blogger Blog! That’s certainly good news and may cheer up some of the people who are having a problem deciding what to do since they can no longer run their Blogger blog by FTP.

Blogger suggests moving your blog to what they call a “custom domain.” They explain what this is in FTP vs. Custom Domains. A custom domain gives you a domain name of your own rather than a blogspot.com URL, even though the blog is run by Blogger and hosted on Google’s servers. To use a custom domain, you first register your domain name. Then, in your Blogger dashboard, go to Settings > Publishing and switch to Custom Domain publishing. Tell them your domain name and you’re set to publish there.

Blogger’s initial announcement of the change promised help in making the transition in the form of a migration tool that will walk you through the migration from a current URL to a Blogger managed URL. A Blogger managed URL can be either a custom domain or a blogspot.com blog. Blogger also set up a blog dedicated to just Blogger FTP Info to help with the transition.

Blogger Widgets wrote a tutorial about Blogger FTP to Custom Domain Migration that is helpful.

Cross posted in a different version at BlogHer.