A Consuming Experience

When I was tinkering with test Blogger Beta blogs earlier, there was a new note on one of the pages saying you could post to Blogger using Google Docs & Spreadsheets. I'd not seen that before (maybe it was in Docs but I don't use that much, or hadn't so far).

I wish I'd taken a screenshot, because I can't now find it again - perhaps Google are adding that note randomly to various blogs?

However I thought I'd try taking a look at Google Docs & Spreadsheets, and there is indeed now an option to publish to a blog when you go to the Publish tab:

You then have to click to set your blog login settings from that page:


Note that they're offering a choice of blogging platforms, not just restricting it to Blogger, i.e. BlogHarbor, BlogWare, LiveJournal, SquareSpace and even WordPress:


One trap here, if you use Blogger you may forgiven for not bothering to click on the dropdown because at first sight you might think you don't have to, but in fact if you're on Blogger Beta you have to make sure you do that and select the second option, or it won't publish to your blog, even when you use the correct username and password for Beta.

My attempt to do a test post to a test Blogger Beta blog didn't work for that reason:

But posting to a test "classic" Blogger blog did - when you click Post to blog you get a popup to confirm it's OK to post:


And after it's posted you get confirmation it's been published plus the option to Republish or Remove from the blog:

My test post via Docs, a deathless (untitled) asdf, is here - nothing much to see, really!

I'm sure it will work with Blogger Beta too, provided the correct option is chosen from the dropdown.

I was whinging before about Google not integrating their products/services enough, but clearly, from things like this (and a recent interview given to the FT which I read), they do realise the importance of coordinating their services. Good on Google.

As there are some standard keyboard shortcuts in Docs & Spreadsheets (still not enough though, in my book!), as a keyboard fan I may even try using it for drafting future posts now - and I'd be interested to see if posting a spreadsheet will work too, haven't tried that yet though. Hats off to Kirk, who had speculated to me not too long ago that Google might get us to use Docs as the post editor for Blogger. I thought it might be too soon for them to try that as they were still sorting out Blogger Beta, but he was right!

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