Custom Redirects, And Old FTP Published Blog URLs

Long ago, Blogger blog owners would publish a blog as part of an existing website. With the website published as "www.mydomain.com", they would create a website subdirectory "www.mydomain.com/myblog", and publish the blog there.

The option to publish a blog as "www.mydomain.com/myblog" required an externally maintained domain / website - and the Blogger feature "FTP Publishing". In 2010, Blogger, with many man hours spent fixing a constant stream of problems, retired "FTP Publishing", in favour of "Custom Domain Publishing".

Custom Domain Publishing, like FTP Publishing, lets us publish our Blogger blogs to non BlogSpot URLs. Unlike an FTP published blog, a custom domain published blog requires a separate subdomain for each different blog. If a non Blogger website is hosted as "www.mydomain.com", a Blogger blog can only be published to "blog.mydomain.com" - and "www.mydomain.com/blog" became an impossibility.

Last year, Blogger introduced Custom Redirects, as part of the "Search Preferences" feature. Now, once again, a Blogger blog can be addressed as "www.mydomain.com/myblog", when hosted as "www.mydomain.com" - though a non Blogger website (if one exists) cannot be directly hosted as "www.mydomain.com", simultaneously.

It may be possible, however, to host an externally published website as "site.mydomain.com", and a Blogger blog as "www.mydomain.com" - and use the Blogger "Missing Files Host" feature to locate website pages, dynamically, in "site.mydomain.com". There may be hope, for people who declined to migrate their FTP Published blogs, in 2009 - and who now have static "blogs" as frozen pages in their external websites.

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Attempting To Remove Old FTP Published Blogs From Blogger Account Corrupts The BlogList

Recently, we've seen a few reports from unhappy blog owners who used to publish blogs using FTP, who tried to delete the FTP published blogs from their Blogger account, and now can't access their dashboard bloglist - or even login to their Blogger accounts successfully.

I recently tried to delete an old FTP published blog from our account, I hit the "delete blog" button, and I get error code bX-dm6o9e. When I try to access my dashboard, I get the same error.

The option to publish a Blogger blog to remote, non Google hosted, server space - known as FTP Publishing - ended several years ago. Now, people attempting to clean up their blog list, and trying to remove old, FTP published blogs will find a problem. We note that the dashboard utilities, in general, can still be accessed, using the navbar links - or the quick edit post links.

We have a Problem Rollup discussion, where we are requesting diagnostic details from victims of this problem.

1. Have you tried using the Classic or the New GUI - or both?
2. Does your Blogger account use a Blogger, Google, or Google+ profile?
3. What's your Blogger Profile URL?
4. Is the blog being deleted in existence, on the remote server?
5. Does the blog being deleted have current and valid DNS addresses, pointing to the contents?
6. What's the URL of the blog being deleted?
7. What browsers have you tried using? Do you get the bX-dm6o9e error from each browser?

If you are experiencing the bX-dm6o9e code, please answer the questions as best you can, to encourage Blogger Engineering to identify and correct the cause of the problem.

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Blogger Does Not Have An FTP Server

One sign of confusion, seen occasionally in Blogger Help Forum: How Do I?, involves the use of FTP - and options for updating our blogs.

How do I publish my posts using an FTP desktop program?

and

How do I upload a custom home page (sitemap, .htaccess, etc)?

People who are used to publishing a website see these options as a normal feature in any website maintenance process.

Blogger, however, is a blogging platform - and provides none of these options.

Until several years ago, Blogger used FTP as a publishing process - for externally hosted blogs. Having developed Custom Domain Publishing as a feature to replace FTP Publishing, Blogger later discontinued FTP Publishing.

Blogger does not provide for custom files, such as an uploadable home page, sitemap, or .htaccess file. The Blogger infrastructure makes those features irrelevant. Nor does Blogger provide an FTP server for uploading custom files - or even posts, for publication.

Blogger provides us the Posts Editor (for editing and publishing posts), the Template Editor (for choosing and editing the template), and a host of miscellaneous dashboard utilities (for making various settings changes). And, we have Google Webmaster Tools, for publishing a sitemap and other search engine related adjustments.

Everything that we need, we can find from our dashboard, at http://www.blogger.com - or from using recognised third party desktop programs like Windows Live Writer.

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