Photoquarium Blog

I am sure that anyone that has even remotely tried to follow my blogging will have noticed that I haven’t been that consistant. Posts have been spuratic to say the least. 

I am hopefully going to rectify that and start disceplening myself more to publish post on a more regular basis. To my defense though, I have been posting on my companies internal blog and I just realized why try and post to two blogs when I can just take these internal articles and post them here. I will however sanitize them so that if there happens to be any sensitive data  (names, numbers, project specifics, etc) will be generalized orr take out. 

So starting tomorrow I am going to be publishing the these posts ( I don’t think I can them articles) and hopefully this will get me in the habbit of posting one article a week. 

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.

Yes the “Hello World” post. Hi everyone out there, this will be the place where I blog about photography. My take on photography, tutorials (most likely links to others), experiences, etc. I am going to make a semi regular post or at least try.