A couple of days ago, I received this email:

Dear FTP user:

You are receiving this e-mail because one or more of your blogs at Blogger.com are set up to publish via FTP. We recently announced a planned shut-down of FTP support on Blogger Buzz (the official Blogger blog), and wanted to make sure you saw the announcement. We will be following up with more information via e-mail in the weeks ahead, and regularly updating a blog dedicated to this service shut-down here: http://blogger-ftp.blogspot.com/.

The full text of the announcement at Blogger Buzz follows.

Last May, we discussed a number of challenges facing[1] Blogger users who relied on FTP to publish their blogs. 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.

Three years ago we launched Custom Domains[2] to give users the simplicity of Blogger, the scalability of Google hosting, and the flexibility of hosting your blog at your own URL. Last year’s post discussed the advantages of custom domains over FTP[3] and addressed a number of reasons users have continued to use FTP publishing. (If you’re interested in reading more about Custom Domains, our Help Center has a good overview[4] of how to use them on your blog.) In evaluating the investment needed to continue supporting FTP, we have decided that we could not justify diverting further engineering resources away from building new features for all users.

For that reason, we are announcing today that we will no longer support FTP publishing in Blogger after March 26, 2010. We realize that this will not necessarily be welcome news for some users, and we are committed to making the transition as seamless as possible. To that end:

• • We are building a migration tool that will walk users through a migration from their current URL to a Blogger-managed URL (either a Custom Domain or a Blogspot URL) that will be available to all users the week of February 22. This tool will handle redirecting traffic from the old URL to the new URL, and will handle the vast majority of situations.
  • We will be providing a dedicated blog[5] and help documentation
  • Blogger team members will also be available to answer questions on the forum, comments on the blog, and in a few scheduled conference calls once the tool is released.

We have a number of big releases planned in 2010. While we recognize that this decision will frustrate some users, we look forward to showing you the many great things on the way. Thanks for using Blogger.

Regards,

Rick Klau

Blogger Product Manager

Google

1600 Amphitheatre Parkway

Mountain View, CA 94043

[1] http://buzz.blogger.com/2009/05/ftp-vs-custom-domains.html

[2] http://buzz.blogger.com/2007/01/blogger-custom-domains.html

[3] http://buzz.blogger.com/2009/05/ftp-vs-custom-domains.html

[4] http://www.google.com/support/blogger/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55373

[5] http://blogger-ftp.blogspot.com/

At the moment, I have 5 active blogs, all being run via Blogger and FTP. I temporarily have tried the custom domain option for my book blog (bookreviews.eiserman.net) which seems to work, but I am quite wary. I think that it is time to change providers and switch to wordpress, so I will build that out and see what happens.

It’s not too late to change you mind Google, but I suspect that that is not going to happen.