Blogger cruelly shunts off FTP support, adds a template designer
After seriously miffing off old school bloggers with their troublesome decision to withdraw all FTP support, Blogger are looking to sweeten the pill with their new Blogger Template Designer tool.
The Template Designer has turned up in their ‘Blogger in Draft‘ experimental playground, and promises to “go beyond static templates and reinvent the whole process of designing your blog.”
Google say that the Designer is their first step to improving both template designs and the ways that users can customise the look and layout of their blogs – as seen in this video below.
Here’s what the new tool currently offers:
* Fifteen new professional templates to start from (and more on their way)
* Custom blog layouts with one, two and three columns
* Hundreds of free professional background images from iStockphoto, the leading microstock image marketplace
* Customizable colours, fonts and more
WTF? FTP R.I.P.?! FU GOOGLE!
Google has also knocked out a screencast tutorial called, ‘Blogger FTP Migration Tool Walkthrough.’
This rather complicated and bothersome procedure is compulsory for users now being arbitrarily booted off FTP publishing with Blogger and forced into transferring their work to either blogspot.com or Blogger Custom Domains hosting.
More information can be found at http://blogger-ftp.blogspot.com/ but it certainly looks a fiddly task, and there’s been a lot of complaints from bloggers online about this decision.
As for us, we were so annoyed at Google’s antics that we moved our eight-year old personal blog to WordPress – now that’s what we call socking it to The Man!
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I’ve had the same thing and I’ve moved off to Blogger too. What were Google thinking by treating their long time users like this?
i’m continuing to use an ftp-like solution (reverse publishing) on my website…. not that hard. i open-sourced some example code, anyone can do it though.