Yesterday, while showing a professor Google Docs, I discovered a feature I hadn’t seen before: the “publish to blog” option (not unlike the same feature in Flickr and del.icio.us and, from what I now understand, was also available with Writely). I wanted to test it out, so this morning I tried pulling in the outline of a presentation I will be doing with Jerry and Andy at ACCS this Friday in order to see how clean it is — let me tell you something, it is very clean!
Here’s a quick run down of this feature:
Once you have a document you want to post to your blog, click on the Publish tab in the far right-hand side of the Google doc, and you will see the option to Publish to Blog.
You will first need to setup the details of your blog so that it can be published seamlessly. You will need to specify if you have a service hosted blog (like wordpress.com, blogger, etc.) or whether you host it yourself. After that, just put in your login and password info and specify your blogs API, which for WordPress is your blog domain followed by xmlrpc.php, so bavatuesdays would be http://bavatuesdays.com/xmlrpc.php (keep in mind that they refer to this as the movable type api for some reason).
After that, you will have a very clean document published right into a blog post, like this one here. Amazing, and for all those interested this was tested on a WPMu blog installation and it works beautifully. I can’t think of an easier way to publish those college essays you are writing for class to avoid all those pesky printer problems 
Yeah, it’s a cool feature for editing and sharing before blogging. I wrote up a long-ish but basic tutorial on using this feature with Google Notebook to create mashed-up content. It’s part of my still-rough thinking on how to encourage regular faculty to remix ocw and oer.
Since google runs most of my life anyway why not it give it another area to control hah.
I didn’t know google docs did that, very cool. Makes me want to find other ways to use it.
Your discovery skills are still sharp as ever. Nicely done!
Is there a way to give the blogs a title from Google Docs?
Jim,
I ran into the same problem, it is a but confusing because the settings provide you a field to title your blogID/title, but that is unrelated, and in my example the title of the post did not come through either. I should have mentioned it, but in my relative excitement I forgot. That is a fix that Google needs to work on, unless someone else had better luck.
This is really cool. Nice article. I am wondering if anyone knows the blog API for Ning so I can use this to post blog entries to the family website I have with Ning?
Well, I tried it and it worked. Thanks for the pointer!
Very nice find – thanks for the tip. I’ll be testing it this week.
@Cameron,
Here is the list with all the APIs: http://docs.google.com/View?docid=afwwtkhg6gn_aj8z6fsv5kx
Unfortunately I don’t see Ning there, so you may want to contact them and ask.
Lifehacker! I knew you were destined for stardom! Embrace that intertubes love baby.
Yes, it does rock- it is not dynamic (at least the time I tried it a few years back). In January 2006, I published to Blogger a Google Doc Brian and I used for planning our ELI Fish tacos presentation:
http://cogdoghouse.blogspot.com/2006/01/beyond-blog-planning-demo-to-blogger.html
though did not explicitly blog about it, Publish to blog is in (I’ve used it a lot from Gliffy) and ought to be in almost any web content creation app, as the APIs are pretty well established.
Yep I really love this feature of Google Docs. This is what I use it to publish to my blog.
I had the same problem of title not showing up. Hope this gets resolved soon….
Super und Danke für deine Tips die man hier finden kann!!!
Und mach weiter so
MfG
Sky
regarding the title: maybe try to use the format option. And use the header one (only) for the title of the doc. Blogger seems to choose the header1 format over the Google Document Name. I doscovered that by accident.
@Moritz-
That doesn’t seem to work either, it really seems there is no way to set a title for blog articles posted to Blogspot, although it works fine for many other blog platforms such as WordPress.
The first ### of letters will be used as the post URL, but if you look closely it is clear that a title still is not set, and unfortunately it will not use just the first line, or pay any attention to formatting.
If you did find any way to set a blog post title when posting directly from G Docs, please explain how exactly, as that would be quite useful
This seems to be out of date a bit, Google has changed a few things since this.
Also, I’ve found MetaWeblog API to work a lot better than MovableType.
Here’s yet another guide.
http://sethmoore.info/?p=230
Seth,
Thanks for the updated how-to, I tried it out and it works like a charm. Been having problems with the original setup, but given this tutorial is 2 years old, not surprised it’s now out-of-date.
The guide at Seth´s blog has changed permalink, after some searching I found it at http://www.seth-moore.com/2010/02/how-to-post-to-wordpress-blog-via.html