FTP Publishing Blogging Software
5th March 2010 by Hannah Parker
With the impending demise of FTP publishing for Blogger, we have been looking around for any other Blogging services or software that allows FTP publishing.
Why FTP publishing? Well it’s particularly good for websites with no server side scripting facilities. Ideally we would get a nice WordPress blog going on a website – but this isn’t always possible.
Blogger was useful in that it was web based – you could create and upload your blogs from anywhere. The alternatives I’ve been looking at seem to all be desktop software. The big disadvantage of this being that I would have to download and install the software anywhere I want to use it. (Haven’t even checked to see if it is actually compatible with having 2 installations of the software – or if uploading from one version of the installation would overwrite). I’ve just download and tested one called Thingamablog for example… it’s all right. It’s not perfect
What do I want from my FTP publishing blog software (that I haven’t found in anything other than Blogger yet…)
- Well – ideally web based rather than desktop software
- SEO friendly URLs and Titles. I’m guessing people who write blogging software aren’t really “down with” the whole SEO malarky as so many of them create endless duplicate title tags and URLs of the format blog/entry_1.html (keywords, keywords, keywords – where are my keywords??)
- SEO friendly usage of H1 tags – same thoughts as above really. The one I’ve just tested does allow you to go into the html and add your own H1 tags – but it immediately degenerates into the homepage having some sort of h1 festival when more than one post is published.
- Some Comment mechanism – this one must be quite tricky to integrate into blogging software that relies on FTP publishing. Blogger relies on saving the comment at Blogger until you’ve reviewed and accepted it and published to your site. I suppose it could be via email. There are some Commenting system add-ons such as HaloScan though
And then of course there are all the usual requirements…
- Permalinks
- Post Date
- Categories
- Trackback and or pingback
- RSS feed
- Multiple authors
Of course, having said this… you might have noticed that I haven’t downed my SEO tools to write my own bit of blogging software. I’m contenting myself with moaning about others!