Note to Self 14: Blogger FTP Problems

Way back in January, Google announced that they will no longer be supporting FTP publishing. Unfortunately for me, I was apparently one of only 0.5% of all people who actually relied on this offering. I finally buckled down and solved the problem. Here’s what I learned:

• The migration tool they offer (see the yellow box at the top of your blogger dashboard) is not going to work for you if you want to use a custom domain. You’ll have to use a manual process.
• Though the process is not difficult, you’ll want to do a bit of reading before diving into this. Making a mistake could cause you more grief than you really want. Here’s an article that I found particularly helpful.
• If you have downloads or images on your site that you want to maintain, they won’t be part of the migration. You’ll have to setup a missing files host. A missing files host is just another place to look in the event your page contains broken links. Blogger requires that your missing file host is a subdomain. I’d recommend you read this article to learn more.
• In the Blogger Publishing Settings, I set my domain name to www.darrellhawley.com so that I could maintain my original urls while my missing file host was set to www2. I was concerned that this might cause my problems, but I was pleasantly surprised.
• Repointing my domains is something that I always dread and this was no different though it appears I had nothing to worry about. I pointed my www2 subdomain at my original host and my naked domain (i.e., darrellhawley.com as opposed www.darrellhawley.com) at the IP addresses provided by Blogger.