Jay Eye Sea

I wrote this blog post in Google Docs and used the ‘publish to blog’ functionality to post it. The functionality to post to a variety of blogging services and software has been around for a while (since at least the start of this year) but hasn’t attracted that much attention. So does it matter? Is it useful (i.e. is it much better than using the built-in editor in your blog)? I think there are four reasons why this is the case:

1. You can work off-line in Google docs. Off-line working is the ‘killer app’ for me, as I spend a lot of time on planes and trains without internet connectivity. It’s the recent release of off-line functionality in Google docs that got me interested in this feature.
2. You can work in the same environment for all document / page creation and editting. I already use Google Docs for a lot of other work, so this allows me to use the same familiar environment for writing blog posts.
3. Google Docs is a better editor. This depends on what the alternative is, but in my view GD is better than the editting software in all the blog services / software I’ve used (WordPress & Blogger). One examples is the ability to create comment in Google docs (see below)
4. Better collaboration features - with Google docs it’s easy to share a draft with someone, just to review or also to edit. And you can do this without having to deal with giving them access to your blog - just put in an email address and click ‘invite’. This might be more suited to longer articles / papers than short blog posts, but I still find it useful on the shorter posts

As well as these advantages, what’s more exciting than being able to post a blog from Googel docs is being able to update it as well - from a work flow perspective, you only post once, but you may update several times.

There are a couple of glitches at the moment, though.

When used with wordpress.com, Google (or WordPress) seems to be ignoring the ‘Blog title’ field in the settings, so it posts to my default blog http://ileader.wordpress.com instead of Jay Eye Sea (see image of settings screen). So I didn’t really blog this directly from google docs. I posted to my default blog then copied over the HTML - and this eliminates the update / work flow benefits.

Another problem is that images don’t seem to transfer properly either - the blog entry has an <img> tag but no reference to the file.

But it will be great when these are ironed out.