migrated your blogs

Migrating off of FTP after May 1

As planned, we turned off support for FTP publishing last night. For those of you who have not yet migrated your blogs, we have updated the Migration Tool to allow you to continue to update your blog.

If you still have an FTP blog in your account, you will see an alert on your Blogger Dashboard. Follow that link to the Migration Tool, then select the blog you wish to migrate off of FTP.

After you download a backup of your blog, you will be prompted to select a new URL for your blog: either at your own domain or at blogspot.com. If you wish to have your blog hosted at a subdomain of your domain, you will need to create the CNAME before proceeding; details for doing so are here.

Once you make your selection (and if necessary, create your CNAME), you will download a ZIP file containing a full archive of your blog, with updated pointers to your new URL included in the HTML for each post.

Download and extract the files from the ZIP file, then upload the files to your FTP host. Once that upload is completed, you will be done with your migration. You can now create new posts and edit old posts from within Blogger, and visitors to your old URLs will be redirected to the new location.

If you encounter problems with the Migration Tool, please file an issue in the Issue Tracker and a Blogger team member will investigate.

Advanced setup: moving from www to www

A number of users have asked about preserving their current URL. We opted not to support this scenario with the Migration Tool because of the risk of breaking file URLs in the process -- but several of you have asked about the best way to do this and I promised a blog post documenting it.

Scenario: You host a blog at www.myblog.com, published via FTP. You host your blog (and only your blog) at this address, and you want to continue to use Blogger to publish to www.myblog.com using Blogger's Custom Domains feature. This walk-through will identify the steps needed to do that. Keep in mind that any files you previously hosted on www.myblog.com -- like uploaded images, PDFs, etc., whether they're www.myblog.com/resume.pdf or www.myblog.com/uploads/images/foo.jpg -- are currently hosted at www.myblog.com too. Note: When you update your domain so that www.myblog.com points to Blogger's servers, any references to those files will break unless you follow these instructions.

1. Create your "missing files" CNAME. This will be a secondary domain you will create that will act as a backup for requests that go to Blogger which result in a 404.  (More on this issue here.) To create the CNAME, pick a name for this backup domain ("files" is a popular choice) and point it at your webhost's IP address. If you have a question about setting up this CNAME, check with your domain registrar and/or webhost. (It's possible, through a tool like CPanel, that your webhost has simplified tools for this step. Check with them.)


Important: pick an image that currently works at www.myblog.com and verify that it also works at files.myblog.com before proceeding. It may take up to a few hours for DNS to propagate; be patient.

2. At Blogger.com, click on "Settings | Publishing" and click on "Switch to: Custom Domain".

Click "Advanced":

and type in your domain ("www.myblog.com").

3. Click "yes" under "Use a Missing Files Host" and type in the URL you picked in step 1.

4. Fill in the word verification, and click "save settings".

5. Now update the CNAME for 'www' at your domain registrar, so that 'www' points to 'ghs.google.com.' (The trailing period is important.)

Once you click "save settings", Blogger will immediately start serving requests it receives for www.myblog.com. There may be a delay of a few hours as your DNS changes propagate. That's it -- by following these steps you will successfully convert your FTP blog into a Blogger Custom Domain blog and keep the same URL you had before.

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

FTP Migration Tool Released

Earlier this evening we released the FTP Migration Tool. We are initially releasing the tool to Blogger in Draft so that we can closely observe the tool’s performance before releasing it to all users at www.blogger.com. If you’d like to give it a try, you may go to Blogger in Draft; if you have one or more FTP blogs in your account, you’ll see this alert:

This screencast walks you through the process:





A few notes about the tool:

• The final post is in English only; translated versions for non-English blogs will be available next week
• Once the migration is complete, you can delete the final post from your blog’s dashboard by going to Edit Posts and selecting the post for deletion. It will remain on your FTP blog so that visitors to that blog will know about the new location.
• Once you migrate your blog to Blogger hosting, you won't be able to return it to FTP publishing

If you encounter any problems during your use of the migration tool, we’re collecting reports of problems her and will continue to reach out directly to help resolve any outstanding issues.

Migration tool update: launching tonight

A more complete post will follow when the tool is available in production later tonight, but we wanted to let you know that we are in the process of pushing the latest Blogger build which contains the FTP Migration Tool. Before we release it, we will do a final sanity test to ensure that everything behaves as it should - and expect to push it first to Draft and a short time later to www.

I did a screencast of the tool to give you an idea of how this will work. This assumes you're moving from an FTP blog to a Custom Domain; we'll do a separate screencast (likely later tonight) showing the same process but moving to a Blogspot URL.

Friday, February 26, 2010

Migration tool postponed until first part of next week

We've been working around the clock to get the migration tool launched this week as originally promised, and ran into two bugs which we are in the process of correcting. We are not happy about delaying this by a couple days, but launching it with the knowledge that a few bugs remained is definitely not the way to go into a weekend.

We'll have the video walkthrough and announcement post on this blog as soon as it's ready.

Monday, February 22, 2010

Migration tool almost ready, still on track

When we announced the migration tool last month, we pointed to the week of February 22 for its launch. That week is upon us, and we're just about ready to launch. We're doing some final QA on the tool, and will get it launched this week. Exact launch date is subject to a few variables - but we will update the blog as soon as it's available.

Once launched, you'll see an alert in your dashboard if you have any FTP blogs to migrate, and will be able to get started right away.

Posted in: berita