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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 evaluatin...

Like many of you, we watched in horror as news emerged from Haiti about yesterday's disastrous earthquake. For those of you who publish your blog with Blogger, we built a couple of widgets that make it easy to invite your readers to contribute money to the Red Cross's international disaster relief effort. Pick a size that best fits your sidebar: After clicking the appropriate button, select which of your blogs you want to add the widget to, then click "Add widget". The Red Cross assures us that 100% of the money raised is going to disaster relief efforts in Haiti — we and they thank you for your support! Not on Blogger? Be sure to visit the Red Cross's Haiti banners page with banners that you can add manually, or visit Google's page containing information about relief organizations, news and contact info relating to the earthquake.