The Moth

History (you can safely ignore)

Back in 2002 I came across some (almost) free Linux/Apache space and set up my first manually-created HTML-based home page, which still exists: http://www.danielmoth.com/. In 2004 I wanted to have a blog that would be hosted on a sub-folder of my domain, and at the same time I did not want to mess with setting up a blog engine myself. I found the perfect solution in blogger.com, which offered a web interface for creating blog posts (and managing the pages' template) and it would then use FTP to upload HTML pages to my space (no server-side programming/installation required at all)!

FTP feature dropped by blogger.com

Unfortunately, along the way Google purchased blogger.com and a couple of months ago they announced that they decided to kill the FTP feature, and they are forcing customers using that feature to have their content hosted (in an opaque way) on Google's servers.

Even though I prefer having my content on my own space, I would have considered moving it to Google's servers if I could host my blog in a sub-folder and preserve my full blog URL: http://www.danielmoth.com/Blog/ (including my home pages being hosted at the root of the domain). Sadly, that is not possible.

What now

So I decided to move my blog somewhere else. I'll document on the next few posts how I did that (inc. a tool I wrote) in case it helps someone else in the same situation and also as a reminder to me if I need to do something like this again in the future.