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Blogger Site and FTP

     - Sunday, June 06, 2004

One of the first challenges to moving this site off of blogspot.com and onto my own webserver was figuring out how the FTP process works. See, Blogger comes with this really sweet publishing tool which builds the pages for the site. The hard part is getting it to automtically send the files to my webserver using FTP.

Blogger attempts to establish what's called a passive transfer. That means that my FTP server will send blogger an IP address and port number to use for sending the files. There are 2 problems here: First, the IP address is usually the address of the local machine. But because I'm behind a NAT router, my internal LAN IP address isn't any good to blogger. Second, and even worse, most passive FTP transfers will just pick some random port and send it along. So now, not only is Blogger using the wrong IP, but who know's what port! Not good.

Some FTP programs will discover your external IP address for you, and they'll let you limit the port numbers used for a passive connection. So far, the only one i've gotten working is BulletProof FTP. Since BulletProof requires a license after the 30 day evaluation, I'm still on the lookout for a free FTP server program.

UPDATE: I've decided to go with FileZilla, an open source project at SourceForge. Been using it for a year now and I'm a big fan. Check out the full post on FileZilla FTP.

FTP Problems Forum at BloggerForum.com

posted by Kevin Watts |  Permalink |