Blogger FTP "migration"
I host this blog on blogger and always have, but some of my other blogs like my Pirate Shackand wedding blog are hosted on my own server. Blogger announced they were shutting down FTP recently and they kept promising a tool. But the tool they delivered is not great. Its probably best for people who don't mind switching to a blogspot.com address. But I wanted to keep my same subdomains.
To do this you have to do a couple of things. You have to go to your webhost and set up a CNAME entry in your DNS settings. This redirects the url of your old blog to look at blogger instead of your server (as a side effect, everying under the CNAME subdomain that you are redirecting is no longer accessible to your blog). So, because of that thing in parens in the last sentence you actually need to set up another subdomain as a missing files host and put all the files in there (pictures, mp3s, layout items you were hosting locally). This new subdomain is a missing files host. Your stuff under the original subdomain is still there but you can't point any links or references to them because that CNAME thing is telling all requests for that subdomain to look at blogger's servers, not your servers (so anything actually stored in your server space can't actually be accessed from the web. But its still there if you go looking around in FTP).
You have to go into the blogger dashboard and set it up for a custom domain. You have to specify a missing files host, and this can't be the same as your original subdomain, cause like I said, that CNAME thing in your DNS setting will always tell the browser to look for stuff on bloggers servers, not yours. So for wedding.sakraft.com I set up wedding2.sakraft.com as a missing files host and copied everything from the original subdomain folder into the "wedding2" folder. I set wedding2.sakraft.com as my missing files host in the blogger dashboard for my wedding blog.
This stuff is not explained very well in the migration documentation. It is also not a perfect solution, in my opinion. Anyone that bookmarked my gallery page and not the wedding blog itself is out of luck, unless they go back to my blog and find what is basically a new url for it (or just add a "2" after wedding in the url), but who wants to do that?
I was going to write more of a how to but I got frustrated and went to go and shave. Hopefully there is something here that helps someone. Hopefully it will help me when I go to migrate The Pirate Shack. My wedding blog is already migrated. So thats the difference.
To do this you have to do a couple of things. You have to go to your webhost and set up a CNAME entry in your DNS settings. This redirects the url of your old blog to look at blogger instead of your server (as a side effect, everying under the CNAME subdomain that you are redirecting is no longer accessible to your blog). So, because of that thing in parens in the last sentence you actually need to set up another subdomain as a missing files host and put all the files in there (pictures, mp3s, layout items you were hosting locally). This new subdomain is a missing files host. Your stuff under the original subdomain is still there but you can't point any links or references to them because that CNAME thing is telling all requests for that subdomain to look at blogger's servers, not your servers (so anything actually stored in your server space can't actually be accessed from the web. But its still there if you go looking around in FTP).
You have to go into the blogger dashboard and set it up for a custom domain. You have to specify a missing files host, and this can't be the same as your original subdomain, cause like I said, that CNAME thing in your DNS setting will always tell the browser to look for stuff on bloggers servers, not yours. So for wedding.sakraft.com I set up wedding2.sakraft.com as a missing files host and copied everything from the original subdomain folder into the "wedding2" folder. I set wedding2.sakraft.com as my missing files host in the blogger dashboard for my wedding blog.
This stuff is not explained very well in the migration documentation. It is also not a perfect solution, in my opinion. Anyone that bookmarked my gallery page and not the wedding blog itself is out of luck, unless they go back to my blog and find what is basically a new url for it (or just add a "2" after wedding in the url), but who wants to do that?
I was going to write more of a how to but I got frustrated and went to go and shave. Hopefully there is something here that helps someone. Hopefully it will help me when I go to migrate The Pirate Shack. My wedding blog is already migrated. So thats the difference.
Labels: blogger
posted by scott at 7:23 PM
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