Blogging from Google

Okay, in my last post I posted a blog from Microsoft Word 2007 straight into my blog using the blog API that the latest version of Word supports. I've known I could do this from Google Docs for a bit now, but I hadn't gotten it to work. The reason I hadn't gotten it to work was the same reason that I had trouble getting Microsoft Word to work, the Blog API for Drupal doesn't really work unless the Blog module is turned on. Normally, I blog on my site using the "Story" module rather than the Blog module. However, once I turned on the Blog module, I was able to create Story nodes from Word and now from Google.

Google Documents killer features include the following:

• Easy to use. Anybody can figure this thing out. Login, create a document, edit the document, save. Done.
  
• Easy to share. You can share your document with anyone who has an email address. They can then login, edit your document, and save.
• Easy to compare. After you have edited your document or others have too, you can see every change that has been made by clicking on the Revisions tab. Again, super-easy.
• Spreadsheets too. Many of these same features are available in the Spreadsheets as well as the documents.
  

It's not so great in that some of the editing tools provided are a little too simple. There are no custom styles. There are only three kinds of headings. Tables are difficult to use. Bulleted and numbered lists can't be formatted (outlines are very difficult). You can change fonts, text color, font size, and some other aspects, but there's no way to use styles to make this consistent.

Finally, the worst part is that some of the HTML generated is not clean¿i.e., it actually includes things like font tags and uses line breaks heavily rather than paragraphs. The new Word publisher made my blog entry completely clean. I didn't really use any formatting so it wasn't a complete test, but it was still much cleaner than I've come to expect from Word.

Anyway, I'm using Google Docs heavily at home, especially for collaboration on my pro bono projects. At work, once Word is in place with SharePoint and the other tools to back it up, I think that will be the collaboration location of choice there. We'll see and I'll keep you posted.

Cheers.