Blog Azeroth

Hey everyone - I'm looking for your experiences here.

One of the reasons I switched to self-hosting was to be able to take advantage of Google Docs. I liked being able to create "real" documents in the backend on Google and integrate them on my website. The advantages I saw was being able to let my visitors download the document, have the blog automatically updated if/when I updated the document, and the potential for document collaborators.

Well, I should have played around with Google a bit more as it's not quite that easy.

You can only "embed" Google Spreadsheets. You can post Google Documents to a blog, but it appears you can only post to a post and not a page. I'm also wondering how the integration between a Google doc and Itemstats will work.

Anyway, I'm looking for input from anyone that has played around with this or is currently implementing on your site. Tips, tricks, lessons learned would all be appreciated.

Amanna

I'm not sure I quite follow what you are trying to do. But if you're trying to embed a word document in your page so you just have to edit that document and it will display the updated information in your page, you might want to check out Scribd.

http://www.scribd.com/

I'm not a pro with Google docs either but I have used it a bit. I'm not sure there is a way to export Google docs into a down-loadable file if thats what you were trying to accomplish. The export function seems to just export the doc into a webpage format.

One alternative might be to use Open office. Open office is a open source "Microsoft Office like" suite which will allow you to create your files and save them in a format that most people should be able to read/open.

http://www.openoffice.org/

I'm not sure this really solves the issue because you were trying to use Google Docs as a collaboration tool. I can't think of a way to use Google Docs to "Download the latest copy" of a document from your blog. You'd have to manually export it, format it and upload it into your blog.

The Open Office option is only really usefull if you don't already have an office suite and were looking for an alternative such as Google Docs instead of shelling out big bucks.