Sunday, April 11, 2010

 

The Muffin FTP Blogger Migration

I knew this would happen sooner or later. Blogger is no longer supporting FTP blogs, which is what The Muffin is. Their reason is "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."

So we have to "migrate" the blog to a Blogger-managed URL, which we will be attempting this Monday, April 12.

This news isn't sitting well with FTP bloggers. Imagine publishing a blog for years on your own server, hosting (owning) your own files and posts on your own server, and then having to move your entire blog to a new URL, and losing the ability to control your property. It's like owning your own home and having someone say that you have to pick up and move your house to another location with another address, and all of a sudden you're renting it, instead of owning it.

Not to mention the complications! The Muffin has four years worth of posts, high traffic, SEO, and links to our URL. Now, all The Muffin's posts will have to be redirected to a new URL. I can't imagine this will run smoothly. And what happens to our RSS feed, our traffic to our site, and everything else? I'm not tech savvy enough to wrap my head around this and I'm disappointed in Blogger/Google for making this decision.

Another truly sad part about this is it affects users in China. China's "Great Fire Wall" blocks their ability to use Blogger blogs, and their only way around it was by using FTP blogs.

Ugh. The list of grievances is long. The comments at the bottom of this post explain some of the other concerns FTP bloggers have with the migration.

Over the next couple of days we'll be working out the kinks, so please bear with us.

As with anything, change is always scary but it forces us to move forward. Sometimes situations we view as negative in the beginning can have positive results in the long run. Who knows? Perhaps we'll migrate to their host and find it has more functionality, or perhaps we'll move to Wordpress like we've always wanted to do, and this is just the first step that will propel us toward our goals. We'll just have to see what happens as we dig in. Wish us luck!

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