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.
Technorati Tags: Blogging, Google, GTD, Productivity
[…] from anywhere.” I am creating this article right now using Google Docs. It’s simple and Google Docs makes blog publishing a breeze. No more funky Microsoft formatting when I copy and paste into my blogging editor. I can access my […]
[…] Docs. I’ve talked about Google Docs before on my blog. I discovered it from Leo over at ZenHabits, a top notch productivity blog. Google Docs is a great […]