Blogger classic templates

Back when I first heard about blogger beta I thought it was going to be cool using it because of the new features it offered, such as comment feeds. It *is* cool, but there is one major problem with the new version: you can't post via FTP to your own host the way you can with the classic templates. You can forward your site or point your domain at the blogger site, but I don't want to do that, so I am stuck using the old templates.

I have spent a lot of time getting things set back up the way they were before, hassling with the paths and filenames in blogger to get the FTP publishing working properly, and to get the RSS feed links pointing into the correct locations. It all is working well now, except for one thing: my blog does not see my old archives that I still have on my site. I can force the links to the archives into the site template, which works well enough, but it made me curious about how blogger knows about the archive files that are there when it generates the template pages in the first place. Looking at the template, you can see it is doing an expansion to pull in the archive links, but I don't know enough about it to know where it is pulling that list from.

Maybe it's good to make a clean break from the past, but I like having links to the old stuff around, and at any rate it seems like it ought to be possible to do what I am trying to do. Will post more if/when I get it sorted out.

[update] I thought I had it figured out after doing a little poking around the blogger help area and examining the expansion variables a little more closely. It looks like blogger just takes the path and filename as you configure it and anything in that path will get added to the automatically generated list, but I'm not seeing it. No matter, I guess, but it is bugging me.