Easy Blog Posting with Google Docs - Any Platform!
Filed Under: Blogging, How To, Productivity
Blog Posting Troubles Eliminated
Does it take you more time to post to your blog than it does to write your post? Technical difficulties with blog posting can be a real source of aggravation. Ever try to place tables inside a post? What about getting pictures to be where you want them. How about copy and pasting from MS Word to Blogger or Wordpress ? The HTML gets all messed up and your post looks terrible.
That’s why I had started using ECTO. I still like ECTO for it’s flickr, amazon, tagging, and other features. But formatting of text size and layout can still be difficult sometimes. Today I found another solution that is very good from a formatting point of view, namely being able to insert tables easily.
How to Use Google Docs to Post to Your Blog
- Get a Google account. It’s in the upper right hand corner of Google. (Google has so many great resources available to you, this is something you should do anyway.)
- Go to “My Account”
- Click on “Docs & Spreadsheets“ (might as well bookmark it)
- Click on “New Document”
- Type your article and enjoy the ease of formatting.
- Try inserting a table. Here’s an example:
Monday Tuesday Wednesday Blue Red Yellow Green Orange Purple - Insert a Picture:
- Save. But Google Docs has been saving all along for you. And you can check every save under the revisions tab. Unbelievable. If you want you can also do a “Save As” to save into many other formats such as Word, PDF, HTML, Open Office, Text and more.
- Click on “Publish” in the upper right hand corner. Don’t worry. Nothing will happen until you set things up.
- Click on “Post to Blog.” This is where you will set up access to your blog. You can set this up for all types of blogging platforms such as hosted ones like Blogger and Wordpress.com. Or you can set this up for your own server/custom solution such as Wordpress.org blogs. You will type in your username and password. It will allow you to test whether the settings are correct.
- Click on “Post to Blog” again after your set up is complete. Now you have published to your blog!
Conclusion
Pretty easy. I’m very excited about Google Docs because of this effortless way to post to my blog, and also because I can use Google’s disk space instead of mine for archiving and storage. I’d like to give credit to Leo over at ZenHabits for turning me onto Google Docs through his article on writing. Leo has an excellent blog which covers many things including Getting Things Done by David Allen.
I think I will actually still use ECTO to publish to my site. Here’s why: I use Wordpress.org. I have my blog set up to use my post title in the permalink. Using Google Docs to publish doesn’t carry out that preference. So I will create and format my posts using Google Docs and then copy/paste into ECTO to then publish to my blog. Why don’t I just use the Wordpress online posting tool? It’s better than Blogger, but it is still too slow and quirky for me. Using Google Docs along with ECTO is a good solution for me.
What blog posting process do you use?
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As always, your comments are highly appreciated and welcomed. Thank you to new recent commenters: Ginene and Lizzie.
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Dee | May 12, 2007 | Reply
That sounds great. I’ve never used Google Docs. What I usually do is type my posts on Word just because I want an extra copy of each post incase a nightmare should happen and something happens to my blog. Google Doc sounds good I should give it a try sometime.
agentsully | May 12, 2007 | Reply
Hey Dee, Yeah, it’s really cool. I don’t know if you ran into the problems I had with copy and pasting from MS Word into the Blogger posting tool. It was terrible. Pasting from Google Docs should work better. And I bet since Blogger is by Google it should work great simply posting to Blogger right from Google Docs.
Will you share with us how it works with Blogger? Thanks!
Oscar R | May 12, 2007 | Reply
It looks like a nice idea, but to be true I think it needs to be polished.
I haven’t give Google Docs a real oportunity yet, but I’ve tried posting in to a MT blog and didn’t work (pass problems, but every details was ok).
Anyway, I’m also missing things such as Summaries, extended entries… but this could be ok for the average Joe user maybe.
A note: the image of the sun in this post is near a 1 megabity. Not sure if this was you or GG Docs, but seems way too much.
Dee | May 12, 2007 | Reply
yeah copying and pasting can turn into a nightmare … when you do it you should copy and paste each paragraph at a time. i’m planning on tryin to post from within google doc tomorrow so I’ll let you know how it goes
Nathan | May 22, 2007 | Reply
Great tip!
If only it would do titles correctly, although not too much of a hassle to whip into my blog’s admin and add a title I guess (might mess up the permalink though, hmmm will need testing).
AgentSully | May 22, 2007 | Reply
Hi Nathan, Thanks for the comment. What I do is this: in Google Docs I Copy/paste the title of the doc into the top of the document. When it gets inserted into my blog editor on wordpress I just copy/paste it into the title line. Interesting blog. I joined your MBL community.
Moab | Feb 22, 2008 | Reply
Sounds great, but my Google Docs Titles do not get turned into Blogger post titles, so I have no titles on my posts.
Additionally, I can’t seem to tag my google documents, so there are no catagories assigned to my Blogger posts. Any fixes?
Thanks!
agentsully | Feb 23, 2008 | Reply
@Moab - You are right about the two things it won’t do for you. Regarding title, I type the title as the first line. Then when I copy and paste everything into the WYSIWYG editor, I take one more step and copy/paste in the title into the title field. No solution for the tags. Just have to tag it after you copy/paste. Good luck. Thanks for commenting.
David | Apr 2, 2008 | Reply
nice solution & tip for bloggers
Franca Richard | Apr 15, 2008 | Reply
Interesting post, I will try it today!