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

A Successful Website In 12 Months

Although Brett Tabke, the head honcho at WebmasterWorld, wrote this article on how to build a successful website in 12 months with Google alone over seven years ago it's still good and relevent advice.

"I know the following system works 100% of the time with Google to attain rankings across a wide range of keywords. This is what I do with clients to build a successful site and it has worked every time. The level of success will depend largely on the subject matter, its potential audience, and its level of competition on the net."

I suggest you copy it to a text file, print it out, and refer to it often.

Read More: Successful Site in 12 Months with Google Alone

Page Rank Sculpting

Matt Cutts, the head of Google's Webspam team, cat lover (Hi Ozzie!), and all 'round good guy, has written a helpful post explaining page rank flow, the "nofollow" attribute, and when you should use it (hint: not so much). Page rank can be a complicated subject because Google is quite secretive about the algorithm. It's nice to get a little information straight from a Google employee.

It's a concise and easy to read post (with pictures!). I suggest you give it a look.

Read More: Page Rank Sculpting

Microsoft's Bing.com

Microsoft launches a new search engine at Bing.com, and it looks pretty good too. I hope it works out. As much as I love Google they could use a little competition.

Adsense Cool Tools

AdSense Earnings Tool - You can see your earnings for today, yesterday, this month and since last payment all from a nice little unobtrusive application right on your desktop and in your system tray.

Update: The link is dead. If I can't find an alternative I'll upload the zip file and make it available myself.

More Google Adsense Tools, Tips and Resources from Smashing Magazine.

Happy Birthday Google!

Happy Tenth Birthday Google! Thanks for making the internet a better and more profitable place for us little guys. And your even working on your birthday, there's a pagerank update going on right now. Here's to the next ten you crazy little... thing. Cheers!

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.