I was just reading the post by Thord Hedengren from the Blog Herald, Docs & Spreadsheets as a blogging tool:

There’s another feature which I haven’t tried out yet. You can actually post your work to a blog by setting up some stuff in Docs & Spreadsheet settings. Blogger seems easy enough, and there are API’s ready for some other systems as well including Movable Type but not WordPress. Has anyone tried this to a greater extent?

So I just dived in and tried it out!

Well, I’d say still prefer my WordPress post admin screen maybe because of familiarity, and since Firefox 2 comes with a spell checker that makes everything wonderful… but the thing is… it works!

Here’s how you go about doing it.

1. Get started with Google Docs

Head on to Google Docs, and sign in with your Gmail account credentials.

2. Write your document

Google Docs has a nifty rich text editor just like what you get in Gmail, that allows you to do everything – change your font colors, hyperlink, font faces etc.

Google Docs Editor

After you are done, just click save (on the right!)

3. Configure Blog Settings

This brings you to the publish page… edit your blog settings.

You will see this page!

Publishing to WordPress

Now, if your blog is hosted on Blogger.com, WordPress.com, LiveJournal.com or any of those listed in the drop down box, than all you have to do is to select your platform and key in your blog login credentials.

If yours is hosted by yourself, and you need to know your blog API, and the URL to publish to. You can click the -> Click here for yours < - to find out common Blog APIs and URLs. For WordPress, choose the Movable Type API, and your URL will be http://YOURBLOG/PATH/TO/xmlrpc.php

So key in those stuff, and your login credentials for your blog. Click on test to make sure everything works fine, and you are done!

4. Publish!

Now, for every document you write, all you have to do to post to your blog is to get to the publish page, and click “Post to Blog!”

For me, somehow the phrase “This document has not been published to your blog.” somehow just doesn’t change, even after I have published the post. I wonder why, but just be mindful about that. If not you will end up with multiple posts!

Also, I realised that this is not very nice if you had multiple blogs to post to. Google Docs only allows one blog configuration setting. Note also that you cannot remove the configuration setting once you have configured one!

While Google Doc works to publish a post, I really don’t find it as intuitive and friendly as the native admin screen for each blogging engine. It also doesn’t allow you to add other blog specific things like custom fields, change the post timestamp and stuff like that.

So I’m sticking to my WordPress admin screen. I love it!