Blogger discontinuing FTP publishing feature in Blogspot

Blogger will no longer support FTP publishing in Blogger after March 26, 2010. They realize that this will not necessarily be welcome news for some users, and they are committed to making the transition as seamless as possible. Let us take a look at what and how they will help FTP Publishing users:

• We are building a migration tool that will walk users through a migration from their current URL to a Blogger-managed URL (either a Custom Domain or a Blogspot URL) that will be available to all users the week of February 22. This tool will handle redirecting traffic from the old URL to the new URL, and will handle the vast majority of situations.
• We will be providing a dedicated blog and help documentation to provide as much information as possible to help guide users through the migration off of FTP.
• Blogger team members will also be available to answer questions on the forum, comments on the blog, and in a few scheduled conference calls once the tool is released.

Note: For more information read official blogger buzz post.

Why they are discontinuing FTP publishing:

• only .5% of active blogs are published via FTP
• percentage of our engineering resources devoted to supporting FTP vastly exceeds that
• critical infrastructure that FTP support relies on at Google will soon become unavailable
• which would require that they completely rewrite the code that handles their FTP processing