Blogger to End FTP Publishing

Blogger to End FTP Publishing

Today, while trying to create a Blogger blog for my cooking site, I learned that Google will end FTP publishing support after March 26, 2010. From Blogger Buzz...

Last May, we discussed a number of challenges facing 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.

At first, I was pretty disappointed; I'm one of the half percenters that publishes several Blogger blogs via FTP. I'm currently trying to maintain an investment blog, a political blog and a coin collecting blog all on subdirectories off of a main website (domain) which, it appears as of now, is not supported by Google's Custom Domain option.

Here's what I mean: www.brucified.com (a domain) or anything.brucified.com (a subdomain) is supported by Google Custom Domains but, as I understand, www.brucified.com/blog/ (a subdirectory) is not. This last example is what I'm doing on my websites.

I have several options. I can register the subdomains. I can host on Google's Blogspot domain. I can quit blogging on all those other blogs and do all of my blogging here at Brucified.

I'm too cheap to register extra domains just for blogs and I'm too proud to host my blogs on someone else's domain. The third option sounds like the way to go. I think I'll start doing all of my blogging here and spend more time writing articles for my other sites. Unlike most bloggers, I don't really need "push button publishing." I'm pretty good at writing my own HTML.

This may be a blessing. I've been spreading myself a little thin lately.

Read More: Blogger Buzz: Important Note to FTP Users

How To Get A Million Hits to Your Blog

R.S. McCain of The Other McCain has, to celebrate surpassing one million hits to his blog, revealed his secrets to, well, getting one million hits to your blog.

Here's a preview...

1. Get a Blogspot account.
2. ???
3. One million visitors!

Easy -- aye? Not really.

Read More: How to Get a Million Hits on Your Blog in Less Than a Year
Related: The Underpants Gnome

Optimizing Blogger's CSS

If moving the CSS from your Blogger template to a seperate file is not an option here's another solution that may work for you. You can copy the CSS, compress it using an Online CSS Optimizer, and then paste the optimized CSS back into the template.

I got this idea from Amanda Fazani of Blogger Buster. For more details on this technique go to her site and subscribe to the feed. Within the feed you'll find a link to download her eBook. Fazani's "The Blogger Template Book" is an excellent resource for anyone wanting to customize a Blogger blog.

And with that Blogger Buster is going to be the first link I add to the New Brucified.

Relocating Blogger's CSS

The first two things I do when starting a new, or modifying an existing Blogger blog is backup the original template and relocate the CSS (Cascading Style Sheet).

So lets backup. Go to your template and right click, select all, right click again and copy. Now open up a text editor like notepad and paste in the original template and save. Mine is named "originaltemplatebackup.txt." I create a folder on my computer named after my blog and use it to store important files like this.

I chose Minima as my template because both it and the accompanying CSS are the simplest and easiest to modify.

After you've saved a copy of the original go back to your template and at the top you'll see the start of the 'style' statement. It starts with this…

<style type="text/css">

And ends with this…

</style>

In between those two statements is an awful lot of CSS. We are going to rip it all out of there and relocate it into its own, separate file.

Why? I'll tell you in a minute, I'm on a roll.

Highlight everything between these two 'style' statements including the statements themselves, then right click, copy and then paste it all into your trusty text editor. Name this new text file "blogstitle.css." Mine is named "brucified.css."

Before you close your new blogstitle.css file be sure and remove the now useless <style type="text/css"> at the top and the closing </style> at the bottom of the text file. Save it in the folder on your computer named after your blog. You did create a folder on your computer named after your blog didn't you?

Now you may be asking, "What are we going to do with this shiny new CSS file?" In my case, because I host my blog on my own domain, I'm going to upload it into the root directory of Brucified via FTP using that most excellent Firefox extension FireFTP. If you don't have your own domain and you're using blogspot then you're going to have to find an alternative remote host. There are free hosts available where you can upload your CSS file and your blog can have access to it. Try here or here.

You can now delete all of the style information out of your blog template including those now useless <style> statements. Now you must tell your blog where it can find the style sheet information by putting this...

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://www.where-eva.com/ blogtitle.css" />

right after the <title> tags. Be sure and change the href location to point to your CSS file. Mine looks like this…

<head>
<title> <$BlogPageTitle$> </title>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://www.brucified.com/brucified.css" />
<$BlogMetaData$>
</head>

And that's it, almost. During this process we removed Mr. Bowman's credit from the blog's template and it now resides in our CSS file. That's not a good thing for us or Mr. Bowman.

We can solve our problem by simply deleting the following from our "blogtitle.css" file…

/*
-----------------------------------------------
Blogger Template Style
Name: Minima
Designer: Douglas Bowman
URL: www.stopdesign.com
Date: 26 Feb 2004
----------------------------------------------- */

We have two choices for crediting Mr. Bowman for his work, and we should. We can re-include the credit in the head section of the template like this…

<!--
-----------------------------------------------
Blogger Template Style
Name: Minima
Designer: Douglas Bowman
URL: www.stopdesign.com
Date: 26 Feb 2004
-----------------------------------------------
-->

Or, as I like to do, give the guy a link in the footer like this…

Original Minima Blogger Template Design by <a href="http://www.stopdesign.com">Douglas Bowman</a> and soon to be heavily modified by Me.

Please notice that if you re-include the credit in the template (the first option) that you'll need to change the style comment identifiers from /* */ to markup language comment identifiers <!-- -->

Now, back to the question "why?" Relocating the CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) information does two very important things for us. First, it makes your pages smaller and therefore faster. The CSS file will be cached on the client side (your visitor's browser cache) so it will be readily available if they decide to click around your blog, the information will not need to be downloaded from the server again.

The second and most important reason is that it reduces the code to content ratio of your blog's pages. The code is the necessary markup the user's browser needs to properly display your page. The content is the all important writing you want your visitors to see and the search engine spiders to index. A low code to content ratio will improve your search engine placement.

If you have problems pulling this off leave me comment and I'll try to help you out. Be sure to post your blogs URL (Uniform Resource Locator).

If this technique doesn't work for you because your blog is hosted on Google's Blogspot or you just can't find a place to host your CSS file, fear not. In my next post I'll have an alternative way to optimize Blogger's CSS that will work for you.

Welcome to The New Brucified

Welcome to the new Brucified. I have decided to transform this blog from it's formerly political self into something a little more personal. Since I am, for the most part, a webmaster I’ll be blogging mostly about being a webmaster. No big surprise there, but I also hope to include an occasional little something on what it really means to be, as I am, Brucified.

Along the way I will provide you with some tips that will make your website or blog better, faster and more fun. I’ll be writing about modifying Google’s Blogger, search engine optimization, getting traffic, building websites, making money, computers and some of the techniques I've learned in my over 10 years as a webmaster plus whatever else I think will be informative or at least entertaining.

And I’m going to start right now by explaining...

Why I Chose Google’s Blogger.

1. Blogger is simple. Most people can get the hang of Google’s blog platform quickly. The downside to this simplicity is that Blogger is often accused of not being as customizable or robust as some of the other blogging platforms. That’s a problem I think I can solve.

2. It’s Google (dammit!). Today Google is the most popular search engine in the world. That may and probably will change, but today is today and to get traffic to our sites we have to respect Google’s dominance in search. I use Blogger because I believe it helps me get into Google’s SERPs (search engine results pages). Although I have absolutely no proof of this, I am sure that using Blogger will not hurt my efforts to get my blog noticed.

3. I’m familiar with Blogger. While that’s not a good reason for you to use Blogger it may be a good reason to stay with whatever blogging platform you are most familiar with if you already have a blog. My posts specifically about Blogger may not be relevant in your case, but I do have something to say on the many other issues you’ll encounter running a website or blog.

So hang out, and hang on because the next post is coming right up.