Just in time.

I received an email today that would have had me in a full-on panic about a year ago.

Blogger, it seems, is going to be suspending the FTP option for its users. I used Blogger from the first day I officially went into blogging, back in 2002, before it was sold to Google. Rather than use templates or the sometimes-wonky blogspot hosting (“now you see my blog, now you don’t!”), I used their unique FTP feature to customize my own template and FTP it to my own host, using other services my host provided. It worked really well for me.

It was disheartening to realize, with each passing year once Google acquired Blogger, that I was on the tail-end of blogging technology. Bit by bit Google adjusted Blogger in a direction that favored templates, drag-and-drop, and basically, not favoring people using the old Blogger code to make their own template to send to their own host. I couldn’t really blame Google; by this time Wordpress and other blogging platforms were changing the way things were being done in the world of blogging, and I knew my solution wasn’t going to work. Google had set Blogger up to not function well as I was using it, leaving me to find ways to organize and categorize and hand-code tags so that I could find some measure of competition with the newer, sleeker blogs.

It got to the point, last year, where it became more than I cared to maintain. I just felt like switching from Blogger and all the hand-coding of my template, and moving to Wordpress. I knew I had to take this blog up a few levels, levels which exceed my knowledge of coding. I went with Wordpress, bought the Thesis theme so that I could still customize my site, and I switched hosts.

Had I not done that, I would be, right now, thinking “oh crap.” According to Blogger Buzz:

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. [...] For that reason, we are announcing today that we will no longer support FTP publishing in Blogger after March 26, 2010.

I can’t blame them, particularly from an accountant’s view of things. I’m just amazed that, for once in my life, my timing was right. There’s no way I want to go through the headache of importing and exporting and all that the switch-over involved knowing that I had to, and by a certain date.

I loved using Blogger as I did. I wanted my own host, static pages, and a lot of things I couldn’t get through it any other way than by using the FTP feature. As it is, I would now heartily recommend Wordpress (and do) to anyone looking for something similar.

• Open ID.