The Ape Bot

Beginning March 26, Google will no longer support FTP publishing on its Blogger service. the company announced this change through a blog post as well as through emails to current FTP users.
According to Rick Klau, Blogger product manager, only 0.5% of the active blogs in Blogger are published through FTP. He said that FTP is using up a significant amount of resources while hindering the ability to improve Blogger. In spite of the small number of blogs published via this format, engineering resources that are devoted to FTP support go beyond the 0.5 percent being served.
Klau also added that a particular piece of Google’s infrastructure that works to backup Blogger’s FTP publishing capabilities is also going to become unavailable. If Blogger continues FTP support, the company will have to work on completely rewriting the code that is responsible for FTP processing. He adds that they have evaluated the investment required to continue FTP support and it was found that it’s difficult to justify using engineering resources for it instead of building new capabilities and features for all Blogger users.
When Google purchased Blogger in 2003, the original service only had FTP as the only way to publish blogs from a user’s own domain. A user will need to put up a server and purchase a domain name and Blogger will then send the posts to the server through FTP. Another option is to host the blog on Google’s servers using the blogpost.com domain.
In 2007, however, Google launched Blogger Custom Domains, a feature that allows clients to use dedicated domains while hosting the blog on Google’s servers. Soon, this will be the only option for dedicated domains on managed hosting.