Blogger FTP vs. Custom Domains

Over the weekend on Twitter, I asked for bloggers to share reasons why they used FTP instead of Custom Domains. Most people, once I’d explained the advantages of Custom Domains, tended to agree that was the better path… and the time seemed ripe for diving in, as we’d had a number of FTP-related issues over the last several weeks.

A number of users responded, and I just did a pretty comprehensive post over on Buzz (do I get the award for longest Buzz post ever? I think I do!) If you’re using Blogger FTP and would like to better understand whether Custom Domains might be a better option, I suggest you check it out.

We’ve also created a Help Group specifically around this topic, so we can answer additional questions that you might have. Please read the article, then head over to the help group if you need additional help. Thanks to everyone who provided input, and to all of you who rely on Blogger as your blogging service.

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15 responses to “Blogger FTP vs. Custom Domains”

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    If you use own pages for the comment form, and don't embed the comments like here, the domain/url will be http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID= and not your own domain.

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    Thanks for providing such a long and extremely useful article on Blogger Buzz (it's a new post length record for Blogger Buzz too :D)From the article I can see most of the Blogger user switch to FTP is because they do not know enough about Blogger and its feature. However, 'Export blog' is quite a new feature, I thought publishing a post about this feature in Blogger Buzz would help them discover this new yet great feature.I completely agree with the point that country's block made user switch to FTP. For the Gadget point, Blogger and volunteering coder really need to improve and develop more useful and professional gadget to satisfy professional need. Gadget suggestion in Product Ideas page is absolutely a great way to get opinion from loyal user.Thanks for sharing anyway!

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    I'm using Blogger FTP as a part of my main web site. I have 4 blog created by blogger. One for hifi news, one for music reviews and two forspecial authors. And all autors and main subjects are different and i dont want to combine them in one blog. With FTP publishing this is very simple. Just make the adjusting…To me the main problem of FTP publishing is stepchild of Blogger. FTP Blogger doesnt support a lot of things include, -Gadgets ( followers etc)-Label clouds-Xml styles and special themesand some other things.Because of classic themes my blog look very old school and this is so important for readers (at least in my country) I'm very happy to useblogger but i'm start to experimet some other blog software include WP.And as a last word publishing via FTP is a “must” for me because of cencorship in my country. Sometimes all blogger pages becomeunavailable. When you publish your blogger via FTP, the readers can access to the blog.Best regards from Turkeyps: excuse for my poor English

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    If it wasn't for Blogger-hosted/custom domain blogs being locked into the “.html” file extension, I'd much rather Google host my blog.I do have to add a thank you for your post on Buzz. Google has long had a rep for nearly non-existent support on any of their products (the price you pay for free, I suppose). I know at the start of using anything Google (and tell my clients also), if it breaks, I'm on my own.To see at least ONE person working on a Google product who clearly cares about their user base…is rather refreshing. It gave me hope.

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    @be4u OK, I'll bite: why does “.html” cause a problem for you hosting with us?Re: Google support. I'm actually amazed at how much support we *do* do, and how varied the interactions with users are. That said, I recognize how difficult it can often seem for users to contact us, and am working with our support teams to explore ways of more efficiently handling stuff like this going forward. Share any ideas here, or just drop me an e-mail. Thanks!

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    To what are you referring? Is this separate software: “There is no difference between control/branding between Custom Domains and FTP. In fact, you get more control over the look and feel of your template, with a more sophisticated, point-and-click interface to adding interactive gadgets – all of which are draggable in the template editor to get the exact placement and layout you want.”

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    @Steve – With Layouts, you get a drag-and-drop interface to modifying your site's template. It gives you more control over what goes where, without requiring you to modify the underlying HTML. Most users report that it's much simpler than having to tweak the HTML repeatedly to get the layout just right.Also, layouts support Google Gadgets, giving you access to lots of interactive features that are either not compatible with classic templates at all, or require a fair amount of code tweaking to get them to render properly on your blog.

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    For 10 days blogger controls panels and a lot of blogs are in-accesible in Turkey. We folow blogger offical blog, blogger help forum and google's twitter for new infos. Maybe a new censorship from Turkey we don't know. Now one more time we can understand FTP publishing is very important for us. Thousands of people cant update blogs.

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    Yes, the connectivity problems in Turkey are well known to the Blogger team, and we have a number of people at Google trying to isolate the cause of the problem and resolve it.

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    thanks a lot for such interesign post, but you know it's an interesting topic!

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    cool post! thanks!

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    Anonymous

    Did u check this one!!! Only for strong hearts!!! http://www.shortweet.com/Pic

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    Anonymous

    This is so confusing! The help group link doesn't work. Please google, change your mind about this. You cannot understand the frustration and anger you are causing.

  14.  Avatar

    I prefer FTP, but keep up the great work!

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