You may recall my previous report from attempts to migrate my editorial toolkit to Windows 7 on my new notebook. As of today, I feel that I have prevailed, but it's not an unqualified victory. Here's a short summary.

I like Windows 7 because it is noticeably faster than the old XP, at least when it comes to startup and shutdown. If your computer is a laptop and you keep starting, closing and restarting it frequently during the day, the difference is very noticeable. Windows 7 won't keep you waiting with a hourglass cursor on startup, which XP used to do, and going into or out of hibernation takes only a few seconds.

The new visual ("Aero") interface is nice, with some real improvements such as file and folder handling in the Windows Explorer, and dozens of other gimmicks which are of no consequence to the user.

On a down side, I heartily dislike Windows 7 for its compatibility problems. Frankly, I have never previously had a Windows upgrade which had caused the old programs to behave erratically to the same degree as this version. FrontPage 2003, my mobile broadband modem, Blogger editor (all right, this turned out to be IE8 issue). Microsoft must have anticipated this because they included a wealth of "compatibility modes" in the operating system that were supposed to fix these problems. But the hard fact is that they don't, at least not where it matters.

So today I'm in the process of replacing Front Page 2003 with other software. I'm extensively testing its newer replacements from Microsoft, Expression Web and Sharepoint Designer. Both look and feel just like FrontPage did, but are annoyingly buggy, remarkably each in their own way despite the fact that their editors look almost identical. The layout templates for this site, which make excessive use of FP "include page" components, are only partially supported; I can see that the need to convert to another style of templates is lurking around the corner.

Oh, and my broadband modem is being recognized in only one of five USB ports of my computer. But yes, I can add new articles without any dramatic conversions to the site itself.

Or so I thought. Yesterday I received an email from Blogger, entitled "Important: Changes to Blogger FTP Service".

"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. (...) For that reason, we are announcing today that we will no longer support FTP publishing in Blogger after March 26, 2010. We realize that this will not necessarily be welcome news for some users, and we are committed to making the transition as seamless as possible..."

I have been using Blogger as publishing tool since the start of this site. With all its simplicity, Blogger really brought blogging into the mainstream and I was generally very pleased with it. While I agree with the fact that I'm among only about 0.5% of publishers that are using Blogger to push static HTML files to their own sites via FTP, I think I'm not alone in thinking that it has been one of Blogger's killer features. In fact, it was one of the main reasons for me to choose it in the first place.

I opted to use FTP publishing for two main reasons:

1. Having full control over layout and presentation of pages (no "Blogger bar", risk for unwanted ads etc.)
   
2. To ensure that my published pages and images are hosted at my site, so that I can be sure to retain them for many years - especially if something happened to Blogger in the future, or I choose myself to leave it.

These principles are as valid now as they were then. Without FTP support, my blog pages and images will be confined to Blogger's own hosting. While this has some advantages (simplicity), I'm seriously concerned about my valuable content being spread across many hosts, out of my control. And while the text contants of a blog is rather portable and therefore easy to move around, the embedded images are not. I have been on the web for thirteen years and outlived other services before, so I know what I'm talking about.

It would seem that I have something to keep me busy for the next two months - figuring out a new solution to keep this site going. And growing.

Labels: webmaster