Well, it’s the end of an era folks.
Whenever I have the time, I’ll have to move this blog to something else. In the meantime, Google is remove a feature that has been with Blogger since the beginning. They claim that keeping this particular feature is holding them back. I can’t help but think that they’re just lazy or perhaps being evil.
What feature is this you ask? It’s called SFTP. Basically, it uses a secure connection to upload my blog to my server. When I post, Google renders all of the pages and uploads static copies of them to my server. Why is this important? Two reasons.
First, when someone uses my blog, my server sends them a file. That’s it. No ifs, ands, or buts. This is great because, when I get tons of traffic, my site stays up. The more work my server has to do, the less likely my page is to stay up. This doesn’t matter so much for Google, as they can plausibly claim that whatever they will put together can take a hurricane-force storm of traffic. Still, when it does go down (and Google has outages more frequently than most realize), I will have absolutely no introspection as to why. When someone can’t get to my blog, I’ll have no way to figure out what’s going on. This leads me to the next issue.
Second, this feature was the only way to effectively integrate Blogger into another website. Almost any blog worth reading is part of a larger website. I might have code posted if I’m a programmer. I might have web tools if I’m a business. I might have special access for clients / investors / employees. As of this switch, these sites are dead in the water. The only way to integrate the blog into your site either involves rickety forwarding setups, or doing your best to make Google’s site LOOK like it’s part of yours, without it actually being so.
That’s primarily why I used Blogger. Not only did I use it for that reason, I cannot automatically migrate to their new setup without breaking things–precisely because I used it this way.
People have had stuff running this way for literally a decade. Tons of small businesses and consultants (and big businesses for that matter) were just given eight weeks to track down a consultant and pay them to basically re-engineer their entire site. Bad show Google. Bad show.
So, this is probably the last post here until I figure this out. I doubt I have too many readers of this particular blog, but it’ll be sad to see it go. All of the content will still be here (ironically, another useful property of SFTP that will never people possible with Blogger again).
Good night, and good luck. 🙁
About Jayson Vantuyl
I live in San Francisco, California; have an awesome son, David; and make machines do (subjectively) interesting things. I'm generally an all around handy fellow.