barely 2 entries ago i said that i was deciding on the future of this blog. i was undecided until this morning, when blogger made the decision for me:
Dear FTP user:
You are receiving this e-mail because one or more of your blogs at Blogger.com are set up to publish via FTP. We recently announced a planned shut-down of FTP support on Blogger Buzz (the official Blogger blog), and wanted to make sure you saw the announcement. We will be following up with more information via e-mail in the weeks ahead, and regularly updating a blog dedicated to this service shut-down here: http://blogger-ftp.blogspot.com/.
The full text of the announcement at Blogger Buzz follows.
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. To that end:
We are building a migration tool that will walk users through a migration from their current URL to a Blogger-managed URL (either a Custom Domain or a Blogspot URL) that will be available to all users the week of February 22. This tool will handle redirecting traffic from the old URL to the new URL, and will handle the vast majority of situations.
We will be providing a dedicated blog and help documentation. Blogger team members will also be available to answer questions on the forum, comments on the blog, and in a few scheduled conference calls once the tool is released.
We have a number of big releases planned in 2010. While we recognize that this decision will frustrate some users, we look forward to showing you the many great things on the way. Thanks for using Blogger.
Regards,
Rick Klau Blogger Product Manager Google 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View, CA 94043
in case you never noticed, my URL is not a blogspot one. it is provided by junwei since 2004. the main purpose of having a non-blogspot URL is to break through the great firewall of china. since my political stance has changed considerably since then, this is no longer a valid reason. the effect remains, though, that is me being part of the minority using FTP to upload content.
then comes the part about blogging being last decade. at an age when facebook can well be an internet browser on its own. there're definitely lots of things which can't be said on facebook notes, but these things shouldn't be said by me anyway. i'll still be writing, but perhaps on more sensitive issues, you'll no longer know it's me.
since blogger stops supporting FTP on 26 march, i'll conclude this blog by ending with a series to conclude my NS life.
this episode is an imitation of my life in the past 2 years. i'm undecided, then something happens, and like being guided by an invisible hand i move in a certain direction, not knowing if it's oblivion.
horizontal at 6:18 PM
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
impromptu adventure
it was very random. without much planning, meeting up to discuss, or arguing over the stuff that don't matter, i went to bintan for 3 days with rama and daniel. it was like a top gear adventure on a budget, doing crazy things along the way.
like watching 4 movies within 3 days, realising the value of bahasa melayu mastered over two years in the life saving force, repeatedly making wrong conversions from SGD to ruppiah (it is 1:6500), and briefly keeping a pet seahorse.
time difference included, the return journey took 3 hours more than the journey there. how it happened is still a mystery, but perhaps we should have realised as the name suggests, that falcon is faster than penguin.
bintan is smaller than singapore. despite the fact that bintan is 1881sqkm and singapore is just 700, daniel met his trainee there thrice in 2 days. it's always amazing how you never meet some people in singapore but in some remote corner eons away.
it's been 10 years since i last stayed in a house built on stilts in the sea. i've forgotten how good it felt. i've also forgotten how it feels to get sunburnt.
during the time when i've not been writing, nothing much has happened. so little that i thought i would do away with the ritual of summing up the year, thanking the people who need to be thanked just for the sake of doing so. mainly because in the past year, life has only been 1 day work 2 days off.
and if there ever were a tally, it would only be the number of dead bodies seen, the number of fires attended; both of which i shouldn't be disclosing.
otherwise i could be talking about more intellectual stuff. ever since deciding to put off days to mainly reading, i discovered one great virtue of NS: for 2 years you have total freedom to read anything, unrestricted by academic boundaries. so i would be talking about how the influx of PRCs is severely straining singapore's social fabric.
but it's so big a topic i can write a book on it.
furthermore, nobody reads this blog anyway. i've read somewhere, perhaps ST, that ever since facebook and twitter became commonplace, blogs have become obsolete. the argument for such a statement was done in an intellectual manner which i'm unable to reproduce here after nearly 2 and a half years away from academia.
i never really defined my resolutions or list-of-things to do. but i certainly think 2010 will be a better year. at least i'm finally able to welcome it with optimism and hope and everything obama is able to conjure. and now that my worst nightmare has come true there's nothing else to fear anymore. it feels great.
i'm deciding about the future of this blog. if you're an IE user you'll find the design timeless, the interface friendly and usage intuitive. if you're using chrome or firefox you'll find this blog looking like part of jurassic park.
but even if i come up with an art-of-the-state* CSS script, update frequently and think about what i write before writing it, things might not work. blogs just don't work the way they did anymore, much like pagers.
*art-of-the-state is a phrased coined by a former CEO of my alma mater
there's been a lot of talk about china and chinese, especially after lee kuan yew said our bilingual strategy was all wrong. to me, the government's attitude can be summarised into the following advertisement succintly. i think it has explained why we failed to get people to love china and chinese, more effectively than any chinese research centre can possible do.
i haven't been blogging. because whatever that deserves to be mentioned will get me into trouble, and everything else will do nothing good but show my intellect (or lack thereof) nineteen months into national service.
while i'm not protecting or saving lives or property i sleep a lot. then i read or watch TV. wikipedia too holds a good respository of information which i hope to internalise, but too often i hit a paragraph and decide, i've read and forgotten about this already.
so it might be a better idea to read and watch new things. and once in a while, the ideas from such material crash and get mangled a big idea. today is one of those days, when i realise the books, TV shows (mostly history channel) that i've been catching recently all tell one story.
i still think switching from geography to history was the best decision i made in hwachong, because now i realise how much it intrigues me. strangely though, i remember less of southeast asian history than i think. and i remember more of global economy, IMF and world bank than i imagined.
the kite runner, the afghan, mahathir (a history channel documentary) and 102 minutes that changed america all come from different perspectives with different agenda. maybe it's the order in which i came into contact with them, or just because i'm a bit too free. but they are coming together to paint a very vivid picture of modern history and the middle east. something no single wiki aritcle could have done.
just another unexpected surprise in life. like how i never expected to enjoy NS the way i do now.
as a concluding remark, i believe 黎智英 is the one person responsible for the state of the taiwan media today. just to check how true it is, i've bought his autobiography. check back in a few months.
horizontal at 12:23 AM
