Photoquarium Blog

This morning while trolling through my RSS feeds I found this dandy article on how Google has added a great feature to their Google Docs arsenal. On the Publish tab you can now setup up your blog settings and have a one click publish directly from Google docs.Right now I am writing this blog post inside Google Docs and since I went through the quick setup I was able to post this document directly to my blog. I have been looking for a tool to help kick start my blogging and it seems I have found it. I have been using the Docs and Spreadsheets features (haven’t found a need for Presentations yet) for a while now and this is a great addition. Not only do I have a backup of all the wonderful articles I create but I have a one stop shop for all my docs, blog articles or not.

Previously I was using the demo version of BlogJet. BlogJet is a great tool but I couldn’t justify spending £29.95 (or about $60 CDN) on a blogging tool even with all its features. I am more into the free solutions for blogging since it is not an income generator but a tool for me to place my random thoughts and interests online to share and to archive.

Using Google Docs as my blogging tool will be good but there are a bunch of feature that I will be missing. The first will be the selecting a category for the article. It seems that Google has allowed for the Docs tagging system as a way to map to the categories on your blog.

“To automatically categorize your blog posts, just tag your documents with a category name you already use on your blog site.”

This will limit you on categorizing you posts to ones already generated on the blog. So I guess you better have all your categories setup before hand. I am not sure if I add the category after the article is publish, if it will automatically be placed in there or if I would have to republish the article from Google Docs or manually place the article in the category. I guess some testing is in order.

Another feature that I would like to see is for Google to add the ability to actually tag the articles as well. I am using a self hosted Wordpress install as my blog engine and with it I can tag each article with key words that help search the site to find similar article. It would be great if on the publish tab I could add a bunch of tags and have them posted with my article.

Probably not the last feature but the last feature for this article, I would like to see a way to postpone publishing. Some sort of method to be able to have a few articles in the queue and have them posted when I specify. This would be something like the feature in PixelPost, which I use for my photoblog. I can upload a bunch of photo’s to and for each one specify the date and time on when to publish them. For this though I guess on the publish tab there would be a “publish now” button and a “publish later” button that has a date and time entry field associated with it. When the date and time come up the article gets automatically published.

I will continue to use Google Docs for now and see where it takes me and how useful it is. This might not be powerful enough for everyone but I think it should suffice for me.

Update: 

Well it looks like the Title is not working for Wordpress, as I had to manually add the title on this entry.
As well there categorizing did not work either. I have my docs in a folder called “blog” and subfolders for each category and it posted the entry under uncategorized (the default category).
As an FYI folders are Google’s tags.