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Problems Uploading using FTP to Yahoo GeoCities
By Brian | September 24, 2007 | Share on Facebook
Attention, my five or six regular readers: the reason I disappeared for a few days and then returned with four posts in a row was late last week, my Yahoo! GeoCities account stopped allowing me to upload files to my familygreenberg.com domain. When I tried, the GeoCities File Manager would return an “invalid file” error message. Furthermore, since this blog is hosted on that domain, the Blogger publish function also produced errors. In most cases, I received a message that said “Unknown FTP Error, Port=0″ (even though Blogger gives you no apparent way to set the port and the function had always worked in the past).
Somewhat skeptically, I e-mailed customer service at GeoCities who, to their credit, responded within a few hours with some suggestions, and requested permission to login to my account and test my problem themselves. I described the problem in more detail, provided a screen shot of the error message, and gave them permission. By the end of the next business day, they had tested the problem, were unable to replicate it, and told me that it was probably transient. I agree with them, although I suspect “transient” means that one of their servers went down and needed a reboot. Anyway, FTP is back up and running.
An important note to Blogger users who might be experiencing problems with the publish function, though: even after the FTP problem was fixed on the Yahoo! side, Blogger was still timing out while trying to post. In looking at the settings, I noticed that my FTP user id was set to “bgreenber,” which is my Yahoo! user name. On the Yahoo! site, the suggested user id is “bgreenber@familygreenberg.com” (no quotes in both cases). I changed the blogger user name (which has been working properly for many months now) and the publishing timeout went away. So, if you’re having trouble publishing to GeoCities (or anywhere else, for that matter), you might want to consider adding your domain name to your FTP user id.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled nonsense…
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