Just saw this note when I published the news of the Mumm-Ra statue:
FTP publishing will no longer be available after May 1, 2010
You currently have blogs that are published using FTP. You must migrate your blogs to a new custom domain URL or a blogspot URL. To learn more, see our dedicated blog and help documentation.
Start migration now
Chris here…
Yikes, this is a bit of a sweat! On the one hand, I’d love to see the new version of the site launched by then, as WordPress would solve all these sorts of problems, but realistically, I think it’s a bit much to expect it all to come together by then… 
Hopefully we can get this temporarily sorted - I wonder why this change has been implemented? 
Take care…
Because google loves to make you dependent on them by offering easy interfacing with existing technology then they yank it and force you to come 100% over to their new medium.
I always thought it was easier to manually update the front page anyway…
It has been very convenient to use the blog update for more than one reason… you can do it from anywhere and the updates also automatically flow into our facebook fan page (now at almost 1500 fans by the way).
I tried to update the front page manually and screwed up many of the frames because of minor formating issues that come up depending on your html writing program.
It’ll be a real hassle for me if we lose the ability to ftp updates through that page.
Chris here…
Yeah, as far as I’m aware, updating the front page by using HTML coding of any kind (including using Dreamweaver) shouldn’t work very well because of the way the page is set up. You can actually scrap that system and create a front page that’s updated using HTML, but the problem that you then have is that you have to do everything manually - all the post archiving by month, etc., has to be done manually, and it’s a complete pain. 
Luckily, as I’ve discovered through my own studies, when this site is relaunched in WordPress this all becomes a complete non-issue! However, we do need to think how we’re going to get past this in the meantime (assuming a relaunch by May is out of the question)…
Take care…
I’ve never had any problems updating it Infact it’s screwed up more times for me by using blogger.
You can actually scrap that system and create a front page that’s updated using HTML, but the problem that you then have is that you have to do everything manually - all the post archiving by month, etc., has to be done manually, and it’s a complete pain.
I don’t think it’s that bad. I used to do it with my site with no hassle.
Luckily, as I’ve discovered through my own studies, when this site is relaunched in WordPress this all becomes a complete non-issue!
Take care…
I just hope that when it’s changed it isn’t like he-man.org, forum aside the actual site itself is pi ss poor. In my opinion they have ruined a very good site by allowing users to upload content. The toy guide is a piece of s hite 
I guess from May, we won’t have much choice but to update manually? I doubt the upgrade will be ready for then?
Wow you’re right about that. The toy archive there is terrible. Complete amateur hour, we would have to avoid letting any section be so poorly managed.
In theory though I think the idea of user updated content is good, but in practice they’ve let themselves down big time.
Yeah, I haven’t updated the front page in a while so I totally missed that. Even if we migrate to the new “uploading” system, we have to change the update page to a sub-domain (news.thundercatslair.org). Blogger won’t allow us to use the main thundercatslair.org index for updates which sucks. Although we could probably make the index file a splash page that links to everything, which might be a better idea? It would spotlight different areas of the site!
Actually, that sounds like a great idea!! LOL I just thought of that right now!!
PM sent Manny
Hey Manny, can you tell us a bit more about your plans for the splashpage format you mentioned?
Just a quick update on the front page:
I was able to find an alternate solution to the updating. We will still be using blogger to update the front page. Blogger made us use a subdomain for the posts, so I had the main domain redirect to news.thundercatslair.org for now.
The only thing I do NOT like about this solution is that Blogger is now requiring us to have a blue bar on the top of the page. I think it sucks because we aren’t being hosted by Blogger so we shouldn’t have to use it. At this point, we don’t have a choice.
The DNS is still processing, and you’ll know the new main page is being redirected when you see that (ugly) blue bar on the top.
EDIT:
Well, I guess that didn’t work. Back to the drawing board.
Manny I still think it’s easier to do it manually until the new site is up. I’d sooner that, than the site being offline for hours!
I mean, how often is the front page updated anyway?