Search Engine Marketing Newsletter Winter 2010 1st Quarter

This message is intended for Webconsuls’ clients that use BLOGGER

Many of you have already received an email from Blogger Support (blogger.com) regarding their intention to shut-down FTP (File Transfer Protocol) technical support. If you have not received this email or have not read the email, then you can see it in its entirety below.

Webconsuls is writing today to let you know we are aware of this “change of service” and we are working on an appropriate protocol to assure that the integrity of your blogging activities is maintained.

Important Updates to the E-mail Notice Below:

• The migration tool was released only on draft.blogger the evening of March 3, 2010, as opposed to February 22, 2010. 
• The new deadline for BLOGGER FTP support is May 1, 2010, as opposed to March 26.2010. 

For our clients that have a blog that is part of their website, we are reviewing each of your blogger account/profiles and will stay in touch with you with the steps we will be taking to complete this transition. Until we receive additional information from Blogger, we are unable to ascertain if there will be any fees associated with these changes.

In the meantime: Please do not attempt to use the MIGRATION Tool on your own.

Sincerely,
Webconsuls, LLC
Dick Fay, Dennis Helfand and Judy Helfand
____________________________________________________________

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