[rlharding]

I just got this and think this must relate to my Blog site on PIPs.

Any idea what this means?

THanks!

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: Blogger FTP Info.


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] Blogger Buzz: FTP vs. Custom Domains
[2] Blogger Buzz: Blogger Custom Domains
[3] Blogger Buzz: FTP vs. Custom Domains
[4] How do I use a custom domain name on my blog? - Blogger Help
[5] Blogger FTP Info


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This e-mail is being sent to notify you of important changes to your Blogger account.

[Patrician]

Ruth - we have just become aware of this today too. Give us some time to digest it and see what Stone is going to do.

[rlharding]

Ok..........I am so dense about this I didn't really know what it was about. Now I do I can relax.

[Patrician]

Here is some input form Dustin Cannon of the PIPS Ad Co-op - It really makes perfect sense to me, and just to comfort you until we hear directly from Stone.

Thanks Dustin.

"Regarding Blogger.

I recommend people keep their ftp published blogs and not convert them to blogspot and set up new blogspot blogs. The members will be very confused about that.

I recommend telling them that Blogger cannot take away their blogs already published because they exist on the servers. They will continue to rank and pull traffic. If they change to blogspot and republish they will lose everything they have gained.

They can start new blogs hosted with blogspot if they way and just let the old ones sit. This way they don't lose what they gained.

Dustin
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry"

[Trent Brownrigg]

I agree you should keep the blogs that are already ftp'd to your site because that content is already added an cannot be taken away by anyone but you. Just start a new blog to work on from today forward.

[rlharding]

Thanks.

blah, blah.....why can't I just post a message that says 'thanks'? Why do I have to send something longer?

[Patrician]

There should be a black button at the right lower corner of each post that says 'Thanks' - some times mine doesn't show up - but keep your eye out for it if you don't see it right now.

When you want to say thanks go to the post you want to thank and click.