The Blogger service has been around for some time.  Its the quick and easy way to start up a blog on the Internet in zero time.  Many writers have started their blogs here first.  Its almost a right of passage to being a blogger.

Well, the service has decided to change, and as of March 26, they will no longer be supporting FTP publishing of blogs.  Blogger (owned by Google) announced this on their blog yesterday and sent emails to its subscribers.

From the email:

Last May, we discussed a number of challenges facing Blogger users who relied on FTP to publish their blogs. FTP remains a significant drain on our ability to improve Blogger: 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.

Three years ago we launched Custom Domains to give users the simplicity of Blogger, the scalability of Google hosting, and the flexibility of hosting your blog at your own URL. Last year’s post discussed the advantages of custom domains over FTP and addressed a number of reasons users have continued to use FTP publishing. (If you’re interested in reading more about Custom Domains, our Help Center has a good overview of how to use them on your blog.) In evaluating the investment needed to continue supporting FTP, we have decided that we could not justify diverting further engineering resources away from building new features for all users.

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.

Don’t worry though.  Blogger is offering a migration tool and a dedicated blog to help Blogger FTP users with the change over to Custom Domains.  Its going to be an interesting changeover.  Lets hope its seamless for all those users. Good Luck!