Whats the difference between republishing the index vs. the entire blog?
If you have an FTP blog, you will still need to republish your blog in order to reflect updates. Republish Index Only means that only the index page (and site feed, if enabled) will be republished. Republish Entire Blog will republish the entire blog- the index page, feed, archive & post pages. This will apply your latest template changes to all your blog’s pages. This could take a while if you’ve got a lot of posts.