When I started my first weblog back in 2002, I was using a homegrown blogging platform. It was powered by ASP and a Microsoft Access database, which I later rewrote to use the FileSystemObject to create static files after I learnt that Access didn't scale well even with just a handful of visitors.
Around three years later, I eventually decided to migrate to Blogger because it had some excellent features which I couldn't be bothered to implement myself. The killer feature for me was FTP publishing, which allowed Blogger to upload ASP files to my server so that I could continue to host the blog on my own domain whilst still being able to benefit from its other features, like archive pages, comments and an XML feed.
I was therefore disappointed – but not surprised – to see the announcement that Blogger would no longer support FTP publishing after 26 March 2010 (which was later extended to 1 May 2010). Although the team added a bunch of new features when they launched Blogger Beta in August 2006, FTP publishers couldn't migrate to Blogger Beta until a couple of months later, and even then they couldn't benefit from the full range of new features. It was pretty clear to me then that FTP support was going to be phased out one day, especially when custom domains were announced in January 2007. To be honest, I'm surprised it's not been switched off sooner!
Migrating to custom domains actually offered me the best of both worlds; the ability to host the blog on my own domain without needing to worry about hosting whilst benefiting from all the latest features. Regardless, I decided against it for no good reason other than the fact that it would require some effort on my part.
One advantage of working at Google is that I was able to reach out to the Blogger team and ask what they had planned for the FTP migration tool before it was launched. I was really impressed and relieved to hear that they'd been working hard to design and develop a tool to make the migration from an FTP blog to a custom domain as quick, easy, pain-free and seamless as possible for blog owners, site visitors and search engines alike.
The migration tool is now available on Blogger in Draft, the special version of Blogger where new features are tried out before being released to everyone, and it should be available on www.blogger.com soon. There's an excellent step-by-step screencast of the FTP Migration Tool, which I've embedded later in this post, so I won't go through what that process entails here. However, having now followed the migration process myself, I thought it would be good to mention a few extra things that I did to help make the move as smooth as possible.
Feeds
Before the announcement that FTP support was being deprecated, I had already moved my feed to FeedBurner and was redirecting any requests for the old feed using a custom ASP error page which I configured on my host. Furthermore, rather than provide FeedBurner with the location of the static XML feed on my server, I pointed it at the one hosted by Blogger since I figured that would be faster to update and more reliable.
Note: You don't need to do this, and not everyone with an FTP blog will be able to redirect requests for their old feed to their FeedBurner feed, which is why the Blogger FTP Migration Tool automatically posts to your blog explaining that the blog has moved, giving your readers the new feed address.
Tracking
Since I use Google Analytics to track visitors to my website, I wanted to make sure this would still work. Although my existing profile would have continued to track visits to the blog, the site structure would be different and could have potentially made my reports confusing, so I decided to create a new profile. All I needed to do then was update the tracking code in my blog template to include my new profile identifier.
Note: Updating the tracking code in the template before the migration process would result in the FTP blog being updated to use the new tracking code too, so I did it after the blog has been fully migrated. If you're thinking about doing the same, make sure you read my note about updating templates below.
Template
I had always used a custom template with my FTP blog, so I had to update any absolute references to my CSS, JavaScript and image files. Although Blogger's missing files host could have taken care of this, I prefer to have things like this explicitly defined so it's clear how things are working at a later date.
My blog had also been using Active Server Pages (ASP) for server-side scripting, so my blog template included things like server-side includes and ASP code blocks. Since those obviously wouldn't work on Blogger, I had to make a few changes to remove any server-side scripting. This basically involved moving the content of the includes to directly inside the template and rewriting any of my server-side logic to use jQuery on the client-side instead.
Note: One small gotcha about updating your template after your blog has been moved to a custom domains is that the "Off" option for the NavBar is no longer available. If you had this switched off previously, any changes you make to your template now will add the NavBar code back into your blog. If you're using your own custom template, you may find it doesn't play nicely with your CSS. It should be possible to fix this by updating your CSS though.
Once I'd completed the things above, I was ready to use the migration tool:
Links
Since I often link to my own blog posts from within my blog posts, I need to go back through my old posts and update these links to point to my new blog address. The same applies to any links pointing to my blog from other places, like profile pages on other services or social networks. Although the redirects would direct visitors to the right place, it's always best to remove any unnecessary redirects where you have control over the links.
Tip: If you're using Google Webmaster Tools, it's quite easy to get an idea of where is linking to your blog. Just go to the dashboard for your old FTP blog domain and click the More link under the Links to your site section to see all external links and then select Internal links in the menu to see where you're linking to your blog posts from inside your website. (This will probably return hundreds of URLs, but it should give you a good idea of what you need to update.)
Conclusion
Using the migration tool was really straightforward and I'm pleased it's encouraged me to finally make the switch. I'm going to have to spend some time checking out all the new features that are available to me now I'm finally using Custom Domains.
Since I like to keep my website directory clean, I'll probably give it a few months to see how things go before I delete my old blog posts from the server. I may then create server-side 301 redirects to make sure any visitors, proxies or search engines that have been slow to pick up the changes will still manage to find my posts. If you're planning on migrating and think you're comfortable setting up server-side redirects and getting your hands dirty with Blogger's advanced setup options, you could always just skip using the migration tool and follow the Advanced Setup Checklist.
(Finally, apologies to anyone who briefly saw messages posted to my feed over the last couple of days saying this blog had moved; I was too eager to try out the migration tool and my unusual configuration caused a couple of bugs to surface in the process. These bugs have now been fixed and everything is working!)
Back in August I posted about Blogger Beta being released. Yesterday, they finally announced that users with FTP-publishing blogs could migrate to the new system (using a Google Account) and benefit from some of the improved features.
I’ve just migrated my blog to use Blogger Beta and have discovered a few bugs / issues with it:
Previous Posts
When using the <BloggerPreviousItems> tag in your Blogger template to display previous posts on your individual item pages, this used to display a list of all the posts you made prior to the post that was on the current page. This meant that you could easily use this list of links to go back through your blog archive. This is no longer the case. Instead, it simply shows your 10 most recent posts. If you never re-publish your blog, this wouldn’t be such an issue, but they really shouldn’t have changed this functionality.
Update: 10 November 2006 (13:08) The Blogger Team sez: We’re aware of the Previous Posts issue. I don’t have an ETA for when this will be fixed, though.
Encoding HTML entities
They are no longer encoding the ampersands in the links created by the <$BlogItemCreate$> template tag. For example, this:
Which means any XHTML validation will obviously fail. And they’re still converting line breaks in comments as <BR/> instead of <br /> despite the settings page saying that “single hard-returns entered in the Post Editor will be replaced with single <br /> tags in your blog. [...] This also applies to the comment-posting form.”
Update: 10 November 2006 (13:08) The Blogger Team sez: We did not know about the URL encoding; I’ll add that to our internal bugs tracking system. (We generally don’t report tiny stuff on the Known Issues blog.
Posting comments
Clicking the link to post a comment on a Blogger Beta blog now takes you to a page served over HTTPS instead of HTTP. This page contains both secure and nonsecure items, which means that Internet Explorer users get an annoying popup. (Who cares about those losers though, right?)
Update: 10 November 2006 (13:08) The Blogger Team sez: I’m not familiar with the IE problem on posting comments. (I mean, I didn’t get a popup the last time I tried this.) Can you send the URL of an example page that gave you this alert? [Which I’ve done...]
There are probably loads of other issues that I haven’t even noticed yet but hopefully all the extra features and improvements will overshadow those though. I just hope that the Blogger team don’t let the development of any new features overshadow the need to fix any bugs...
Update: 10 November 2006 (13:08) As you may have seen in my comments, Blogger Beta also seems to generate the blog feed differently. Instead of including the most recently created posts in the feed, it now includes the most recently updated posts. If you’re one of the people who subscribes to my feed and received a load of old posts in your feed reader yesterday, please accept my apologies; I was just taking advantage of one of the new Blogger Beta features and adding labels to all my old posts. (I’ve asked the Blogger Team whether that’s behaviour by design or a bug.)
Just when I was starting to actually believe that Google had abandoned all development on Blogger, I noticed something that could possibly mean that they haven’t forgotten about their free blogging service after all...
As well as migrating Blogger to use Google Accounts, they’ve also (finally) added loads more features:
Customize your template by dragging and dropping page elements; there are also new templates from which to choose).
Create a private blog by editing your permissions to control who can view and contribute to your blog.
Add category labels to your posts – at long last!
More feed options are now available, including RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 (instead of just Atom 0.3) – and also feeds for your blog comments, even on a per-post basis!
Updated Dashboard to check our blog’s activity and make managing your blog easier.
(I wasn’t able to migrate my Blogger account to my Google Account, so I just created a new Blogger Beta account using my usual Google login.)
So, there we have it. After all this time, Google have finally made some changes to the Blogger service that everyone thought they’d forgetten about! Will it be enough? Of course not! Users always want more...
(One final thought – I wonder why they’ve named it “Blogger Beta” rather than “Blogger 2.0 Beta” instead. “Blogger Beta” indicates that it’s a predecessor to Blogger, which it obviously isn’t...)
I recently questioned whether Blogger was finally going to use Google Account logins. Well, here are some screenshots of pages I just discovered that suggest this is highly likely to happen sooner rather than later...
This is what we see before we sign in now
This is what we will start to see soon
This is what we will see if we’re already signed in to our Google Account
In the last screenshot, the ‘Switch now’ link takes you to this page – blogger.com/migrate-login.g – which currently returns a 404 error but will presumably migrate or link your Google Account to your existing Blogger details.
So the only question now is, “When will this happen?”
Update: 14 August 2006 (21:27)
When will this happen? Sooner than we thought perhaps...
Just when I was starting to actually believe that Google had abandoned all development on Blogger, I noticed something that could possibly mean that they haven’t forgotten about their free blogging service after all...
As regular readers will know, I’ve been doing quite a bit of research into Google Account service names recently. As well as periodically checking for new service names, I’m also checking for any changes in behaviour of existing services.
Today I realised that the ‘NewAccount’ and ‘CreateAccount’ pages – which always seem to be identical – no longer generate the usual “The page you requested is invalid.” error when appending the word blogger to the service parameter. Instead, you get this message (when already signed in to your Google Account):
(If you’re not already signed in, you’ll get the usual “Create an Account” page but customized for the Blogger service.)
This behaviour usually only occurs for services that you can sign up for using your Google Account. So, either someone’s introduced a bug that allows this to appear or Google are working on migrating Blogger logins to use Google Accounts.
Unfortunately, that’s where the fun ends for now because clicking the ‘Continue’ button appears to just reload the page whilst submitting the data to the CreateServiceAccount page. Oh well. Maybe all that will change in the next few days... or weeks... or even months!
Anyway, let’s hope this small change means Google are actually going to start developing new features for Blogger again!
It seems that the ‘NewAccount’ and ‘CreateAccount’ pages both return the standard “The page you requested is invalid.” error again.
(BTW, I’ve since realised the difference between the ‘NewAccount’ and ‘CreateAccount’ pages; the ‘CreateAccount’ page will always show the full registration form, whereas the ‘NewAccount’ page will show a “Welcome back ... Get started with ...” page if you’re already signed in to your Google Account. When you’re not already signed in, they always seem to be identical.)
It looks both are even indexing blogs regardless of whether they’re powered by Blogger or not. You can even get the search results as feeds too, which is great for keeping up-to-date on the latest blogs for a particular subject. You can read more about it here.
And, linked to my previous post about Google Toolbar Custom Searches, here’s the necessary registry file to install a Google Blog Search custom search button in your Google Toolbar:
My personal website has seen a number of changes since 1998. Back then it had no content, was "best viewed with Netscape 3.0" and was hosted on an obscure URL given to me by my university department. It’s been hosted on the ruscoe.net domain for the past three years, and yesterday saw the launch of the fifth incarnation.
Why bother?
It’s been over a year since I last made any major changes to my site and I got bored of looking at the same site design everyday. I also wanted to get away from the old-fashioned method of using tables for layout and instead move towards XHTML and better use of CSS.
New Blog
I’ve had an online blog since 2002. (The previous entries from 2000 and 2001 were pulled from my web browser’s bookmarks so I could have an archive when I first put it online!)
I wrote my own first weblog system in ASP with an Access database backend, but I rewrote the whole thing using the FileSystemObject after Access caused me a few problems with server performance. This really didn’t give me much flexibility and since producing an Atom/RSS feed was going to require quite a bit of extra development, I’ve finally made the switch to Blogger.
There’s still some fiddling and tweaking to be done, but please let me know if you have any comments.
