I’m one of the original Bloggers. I started using Blogger on January 12, 2001, long before Google bought it from Pyra Labs. I was the 129,287th blogger on Blogger.com, putting me in the top 0.3% of earliest adopters. But what started over nine years and 450 posts ago will soon be over.
I’ve complained about recent problems with the Blogger’s FTP service and I’ve been thinking of switching to WordPress for a while now. The main reasons I still haven’t switched over yet are because it’s a complicated process to switch over and not lose all the traffic from inbound links, and because I was going to make the switch when I update the rest of my website too, and finally because there was no urgency. Well now that last reason is gone.
Today I got an email from Blogger announcing that “we will no longer support FTP publishing in Blogger”. FTP is the type of blog that I have, which means that I use Blogger.com to post but then those posts are transferred to my own website where the blog is hosted on my own servers. According to Blogger, “only .5% of active blogs are published via FTP”. So apparently I was both an early adopter and now I’m a final holdout too. In any case, I now have until March 26th to get my blog off of Blogger and migrate it to WordPress.
Blogger has set up a blog just for people like me, but only to help move people to Blogger hosted services, not for people to keep their blogs hosted on their own servers. Most of the comments there show that bloggers in my situation are either angry or scared about what to do with years worth of their work. There are a few how-to posts I found on the internet so I’m planning on following these instructions. I sure hope it works because there’s no going back once I start the process.
Getting all my blog posts on to a new platform is just one part of the total process. I also have to create a new from-scratch WordPress template to make my new blog match the look of the rest of my website, like it does at the time I wrote this post. But I don’t have time to do all that now, especially when I also plan on updating the look of the rest of my site anyway, so just a heads up that sometime soon my blog won’t look anything like the rest of my site. It may remain lookig odd for weeks or even months, but eventually I’ll get it looking right again.
