What's Broken In FTP Publishing, This Week?

Blogs published using FTP have always offered interesting challenges for their owners, and for Blogger. The many selling points for Custom Domain publishing, as I recall, included the ability to

• Publish to a Google server.
• Have a blog with dynamic HTML and a Layouts template.
• Have a non-BlogSpot URL.
• Avoid the chronic instabilities of FTP publishing.

This week, we see a plethora of complaints about FTP publishing, in the forums.

What are the possibilities?

1. It's your imagination that your FTP publishing is having problems.
2. A lot of FTP server hosts are having problems.
3. Blogger really broke something - big time.
4. Blogger fixed a lot of non-FTP problems. What you see in the forums is a sudden lack of other complaints ("noise"), making the normal level of FTP publishing problems ("signal") more audible.
5. FTP published blogs are typically produced by bloggers who spend more time at their computers. The climate improving in many parts of the USA has taken other bloggers away from their computers, causing a drop in "noise" in the forums.
6. FTP published blogs are typically produced by bloggers who publish more. Larger blogs, published remotely, will eventually lead to more problems.
7. Increasing popularity of custom domain publishing has drawn many smaller and more casual bloggers away from FTP publishing. Blogger, recognising this trend, is reallocating resources to custom domains, leading to decreased FTP publishing resources.

My personal opinion? I don't see Numbers 1, 2, and / or 3 as the sole causative factors. Numbers 5, 6, and 7 make more sense to me. I will go on record now

Anybody who believes that Blogger broke something, causing one single large problem, is part of the problem. As long as bloggers continue to complain about one large problem, the problem will never go away.

>> (Update 4/18): For an example of the seemingly random nature of FTP Publishing problems, look at this recently discovered detail about publishing to Yahoo Small Business.

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