Publishing Externally? Here's What You Get

Every day now, you see the question

I just upgraded my account and blog to New Blogger. Where is my Layouts template / my Label list / my link to Upgrade my template?

and you look at the blog URL (when it's included), and it's not yourblog.blogspot.com.

And the answer is always that, when you publish externally (aka FTP publishing), you don't get any of those features. New Blogger 2006 requires publishing to blogspot.com, for maximum benefit.

The New Blogger 2006 Blog*Spot servers publish the blog as the reader retrieves each page. They don't publish static HTML, they publish dynamic XML. When you publish by FTP, Blogger is copying old static HTML code to your FTP server. HTML won't get you

• Improved Archives, with multiple selectable views, and individual titles.
• New Layouts template, with GUI configured page elements.
  • Feeds.
  • Labels.
  • Linklists.
• Improved Main Page view, multi-paged, with each page limited in size by the "Show days / posts" setting.
• Improved Template editor, with scripted save and restore of template code.
• The ability to require authentication, and to designate readers, to view the blog. Any blog published by FTP is open to view by all.

What it will get you is

• Authentication by Google account.
• Labels for the posts. You can use the labels in various ways, without the Layouts template based Label page elements.
  • Make your own Label lists, from the labels shortcuts after each post.
  • Select a label shortcut after a post, and view all posts with that label, in a single page Main Page view.
• Improved Edit Posts menu, again with labels.
• The new, more stable Blogger.
• The shiny new Navbar (that you can continue to turn off).
• The continued spinner of death, when you publish (sorry, but static publishing will continue to have this).
• Your own, externally published website, that you can control (though not protect) as you see fit.
• A domain name that you can choose. This may not be exclusive to external publishing.

Nor can you have private blogs. See Settings - Publishing.

Hint: If you want to publish to an external FTP server, you will need to Set 'Blog Readers' to 'Anybody' and use a Classic Template.

Now, if the above issues are a problem for you, but you don't want your blog hosted on Blog*Spot, check out Google Custom Domains. Read my case study, and read about the possible complications, too.