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

Writer's Resources

I'll be adding to this dandy little post of online tools and resources for writers as needed, and found.

The Chicago Manual of Style - An indispensable reference for writers.
Writer's Digest - Write Better, Get Published

You'll have to get your own booze.

Much ink has been spilled on the question of why so many writers are alcoholics. Of America’s seven Nobel laureates, five were lushes - to whom we can add an equally drunk-and-disorderly line of Brits: Dylan Thomas, Malcolm Lowry, Brendan Behan, Patrick Hamilton, Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, all doing the conga to (in most cases) an early grave.

Read More: When Novelists Sober Up

Blogging Mistakes

Problogger.net has an excellent article, "Do You Recognize These 21 Blogging Mistakes?"

My answer - you bet. Of the 21 mistakes here's mine...

3. Echoing everyone else - This post is a good example.
5. Irregular Posting - This blog is, once again, a good example.
17. Becoming a Stats-a-holic - I really can't help myself.
20. Not Selling Yourself - I'm just shy that way.
21. Thinking You Have to Know it All - See above.

5 mistakes out of a possible 21 isn't too bad. with a little rounding that's about a 75; I pass. I feel pretty good about that.

You'll have to visit Problogger.net to see the complete list.

Read More: Do You Recognize These 21 Blogging Mistakes?

Blog Search Engines

I found an excellent post on Breaking Free about building website traffic. I'm not going to do everything Brian suggests but he did have an extensive list of blog search engines that I'll be submitting to over the course of the next several days. You can follow my progress by watching the little buttons appear at the bottom of the right hand column.

Update: There's a lot of dead wood in that list (note to self, make a new list).
Update: Here's another list I'll check out later.

Smashing Magazine Bookmarks

Smashing Magazine is the second link I'll add to my Favorites and to give you an example of why. Here's my current collection of SM bookmarks.

Freebies Round-Up: Icons, Buttons and Templates.
40 Creative Design Layouts: Getting Out Of The Box.
7 Principles Of Clean And Optimized CSS Code.
A Small Design Study Of Big Blogs Part 1 and Part 2.
How To Communicate Design Decisions To Clients.

And finally; 12 Classic Gary Busey Moments. I know, it's not Smashing Magazine, but I was digging around in my Bookmarks and I just couldn't help myself.

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.