The Blogger/Google FTP shutdown

[trayce.livejournal.com]

In my email this morning, as a person who uses Blogger with her own domain:

Dear FTP user:

You are receiving this e-mail because one or more of your blogs at Blogger.com are set up to publish via FTP. We recently announced a planned shut-down of FTP support on Blogger Buzz (the official Blogger blog), and wanted to make sure you saw the announcement. We will be following up with more information via e-mail in the weeks ahead, and regularly updating a blog dedicated to this service shut-down here: http://blogger-ftp.blogspot.com/.


Just posting as per my mention on my previous thread's comments, for discussion. I'm not personally affected but this decision is baffling to me.

No FTP, no SFTP. Google are dropping it because, to quote from the blog, only .5% of active blogs are published via FTP — yet the percentage of our engineering resources devoted to supporting FTP vastly exceeds that. On top of this, critical infrastructure that our FTP support relies on at Google will soon become unavailable, which would require that we completely rewrite the code that handles our FTP processing.

Thoughts? I dont think I understand this really.

Comments

[thecrazyfinn.livejournal.com]

Google's rolling out a major update and dropping several technologies including Flash along with support for obsolete browsers and protocols as they move to HTML 5.

FTP is both a total PITA to develop for, it's clearly not well used and it appears to be a protocol Google's abandoning support for in their clusters. Given a 0.5% usage ratio, I'm shocked support has lasted this long.

[endotoxin.livejournal.com]

FTP is both a total PITA to develop for, it's clearly not well used and [...]

And a complete security hazard to boot. Has been for years.

[amaena.livejournal.com]

SFTP however is not. While being a security vector into the server, its also far more secure than ftp ever was.

The lack of sftp access is cause for concern as php uploading is far *less* secure.

[anivair.livejournal.com]

I agree. And the average sftp user also tends to know what they're doing. I can't understand why they'd drop it unless it's part of the package deal. I mean, i guess if it's not worth it for them it's not worth it, but oh well.

[metao.livejournal.com]

posting as per my mention on my previous thread's comments, for discussion.

We discuss things in this community now?

I guess the Creationists were wrong!

Viva la Evolution, people!

[trayce.livejournal.com]

OK, posting this for much shouting and ranting and gnashing of teef? =)

[metao.livejournal.com]

(well lets be fair: the Creationists are wrong regardless of your post ;))

[bamatone.livejournal.com]

Hehe, it's easy to spot the non-American English speakers. I always find it odd to see sentences like "Google are doing this." and so forth. Google is a single entity (one company), and thus in American English requires the verb "is." Not saying either one is superior or anything - just pointing out the subtle differences in our common language that make me chuckle. :D

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

I've seen it used both ways.

"Google (the company entity) is doing X."

"Google (the employees/managers at Google responsible for this area) are doing X."

It's a matter of whether you're viewing them as a singular monolithic corporate entity or a group of people.

[anivair.livejournal.com]

They are, in fact, neither. they are a group of people with a smaller group in charge of them. Which makes them a monolith-like group.

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

It's easy to spot the people who actually don't know a thing about dialect differences who try an pin a grammatical inconsistency on the OP being from "somewhere else".

It's incorrect (strictly speaking) in UK/Commonwealth English as well. But it's certainly not uncommon in casual circumstances. That's ok, American English speakers make odd errors that UK English speakers don't (such as using "capitol" when they mean "capital").

[ghostdandp.livejournal.com]

and the whole biscuit and cookie thing.. amIrite...

[bamatone.livejournal.com]

I was going to leave well enough alone, but...

Your first paragraph is full of asshole. I'm well versed in discrepancies and inconsistencies, thanks. They make me chuckle nonetheless.

Misusing capital and capitol is not the same thing, as one is certainly correct in a situation where the other is not.

As far as the "strictly speaking" statement regarding the UK, I'll have to defer, as I did not learn the Queen's English and have never lived in the UK. But I can tell you that every publication I've ever read from the modern UK (The Economist, Guardian, Register) all use "are" as the OP did here.

Lastly, don't tell me UK English speakers don't make the same mistakes American English speakers do. I've seen just as many their/they're/there mistakes from Brits. Dumb exists everywhere, as the collection of tech stories in this community proves.

Ugh, I hate that I even had to write this.

Anyway, losing FTP support is a bummer, OP.

[wxgeek.livejournal.com]

What's not to understand? FTP has a lot of maintenance overhead, google doesn't want to support it anymore, and nobody's using it for that service, so they're discontinuing it.

[amaena.livejournal.com]

as mentioned above, sftp requires minimal admin and is as secure as ssh itself (as it is ssh) I can see cause for concern.

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

But why provide a service that 0.5% of your userbase is actually using, secure or not? I certainly wouldn't. It's not as if SFTP would be maintenance-free, either.

[wibbble]

Yer arse. Unless you work on providing Google's infrastructure I don't think you're qualified to determine what counts as 'minimal admin' when scaling out to a platform the size of Blogger.

[synthclarion.livejournal.com]

Trashing FTP is the right thing to do. I can also understand if they want to kill SFTP if only 0.5% of its users need it - it might be a damn sight better than FTP, but it's still an amount of work. Quite frankly, even if all 0.5% of users leave - which they won't - it's not going to make any significant dent on their advertising.

If you think FTP should stay, you're wrong (http://mywiki.wooledge.org/FtpMustDie). If you think SFTP should stay, I sympathise, but as I say it makes business sense to kill off the service. That said, there's nothing at all stopping you self-hosting and doing whatever the hell you like :)