As the Web Burns, Meaningless Trends, On My Mind, Technologically Impaired, internet, nostalgia »

If you publish your blog on a personal domain (away from blogspot.com), and you use the ever-popular Blogger.com to do so, that will all change come next month. March 26th, to be exact.

Before I continue, I feel the need to point out that I somewhat know what I’m talking about when it comes to Blogger.com. I was the 49,107th person to sign up for Blogger, and I have used the service on and off for nearly ten years.

Moving on, I see a few things wrong with this. For one, if I were still dependent on Blogger to publish my site, and my hosts are set up to use Blogger.com specifically, I would be in a pickle right now. For you see, my hosting expires on February 2end. To keep my site, I would naturally, pay for a year’s worth of hosting. Blogger sent out the notice to FTP users, that they were discontinuing the service on March 26th, on February 3erd. Unless they transfer their domain and hosting over to Google’s webhosting. Well, I’ve already paid for my hosting, as have 99.9% of the .5% of the “affected” FTP Blogger users, for the year, and I can’t get that money back. No refunds. $120 gone. I don’t know how much Google webhosting is, but I’m assuming they’re expecting their users to jump over to blogspot.com for free. Huh? I’ve just renewed my hosting for a year, with no refunds, and I’m either going to have to be forced to go to a free, non-professional site, or uproot everything and go to a new CMS. Which isn’t a bad idea to install something on your server so you have 100% control.

Then comes this part of Google’s excuse: “FTP remains a significant drain on our ability to improve Blogger.”

Ok. Well. When I was using Blogger back in 2000/2001, there was no bells or whistles for Blogger. Not even a title box. You had to do every little piece of HTML by hand. And I did, starting with the title tag at the top of my post, then typing everything out. I still do that in my WordPress entries. I’m not that lazy. Posts were numbered references on a page published once per month or week and updated periodically throughout that month or week. Blogger also featured a list of updated blogs on the front page. A Blog of the Month. A blog directory. The front page of Blogger was updated by people with souls, not Google drones.

Blogger was great.

Then in early 2003, Google acquired Blogger, and it became the abomination that it is today. Limited everything. One thing that really made me turn away from Blogger was the fact that in 2003, Google disliked something I published with their software to my personal, privately owned domain, hosted on a server other than their own, so they took the liberty to log into my account, delete the post from my domain and then delete my blog from my account. I never got it backed up. I had to just link to my old archive page. After that violation, which was not even against my hosts TOS and they should have had the final word on whether my content was removed or not, I went into self-hosted publishing platforms.

The moral of the story? Get your blog and go with Wordpress. Or something that you’re comfortable with. Blogger is on it’s way out. You can thank Google for that.