Hello, World.
This is a silly lame test of publishing a doc from gdocs to my blog.
And, this sentence is a test to see if it automatically re-publishes changes. Nope. And, it zaps the title of the post when I manually re-publish. Lame!
Will a different API fix the title issue? It does. Switching from MovableType to Meta fixes the title problem, but I notice that the Blogger API has the same problem with the title. So, only the Meta API works. But there’s still some formatting oddness.
The post ends up with some extra DIV and BR tags but there’s no P tag and the initial text does not have a DIV of its own. That’s messy. That reminds me a bit of how crappy frontpage and word are at converting to HTML. Gdoc is not as ugly by far as frontpage or word, but the code it is sending to the blog is not great.
How about a picture? And, yes, there is an obnoxious picture of me, so that works too. However, what’s going on is that gdocs puts in an image tag into the post that pulls the image remotely from gdocs, so that means anyone that’s got cross-site images turned off, like in Firefox, the images will appear broken. Also, that means that gdocs has to be up and responding for images to appear.
Also, the feature that categorizes the post based on which gdoc folder it’s in doesn’t seem to be working.
Interestingly, the paragraphs after I inserted the image have different formatting in both gdoc and in the code sent to the blog. The paragraphs after the image have DIV styles, whereas these paragraphs above do not. In gdoc, the paragaph spacing is different before and after the image. Above the picture, paragraphs are DIVs with BR tags. After the image, each paragraph is given the DIV style that was applied to the image. And, other than going in to EDIT > EDIT HTML in gdocs, there appears no way to control this. (That’s a feature of gdoc, and doesn’t have much to do with the blog publishing feature.)
The feature where the initial paragraph had crappy formatting appears to be fixed if I add an extra line at the beginning of the document, instead of typing on the first line right off.
Originally each of these paragraphs had an extra line between them in gdoc, but that’s not being represented as P tags in the gdoc HTML, so it ends up looking ugly when sent to my blog. Finally, going in to the EDIT HTML, I made direct changes to the code, and gdoc at least seems to preserve my changes, but it kinda sucks to have to go in to the code and edit that for each paragraph.
Well, so, it’s interesting and could be useful, but there’s some issues that make the blog posting not ideal for the way that I would use it. For occasional use, and for longer documents, this could be useful for documents that are collaborative or likely to under go many edits (like this very one, for example); especially I like the re-publishing feature which is easier than copy and paste to update a post, for sure. Not quite ready for prime time, I don’t think.