Google Docs as a Blog Editor

As a user of writely.com far before that whole Google purchase, I was tentative about the move, but also excited (as Google generally seems to have the whole Web-App thing down cold.) during the general crazy nature of school and a wireless card that had horrible linux support until 2.6.20 (many a thanks to the fellows over at the bcm43xx project ) a web based solution wasn’t really practical, but given a recent group project where collaboration was a big thing, I gave it another try, and as a collaborative outline/scratch sheet, it was fantastic. Given the scientific nature of the project, and the massive amount of math to be displayed/edited for the final report, OpenOffice.org had that honor, but Google Docs won some points with me for general usability.

After noticing the Collaborate button, next came Publish. The ability to post to a blog seemed pretty nifty, and WordPress’ WYSIWYG editor constantly gives me headaches, as it never seems to display properly with my theme (maybe I just use a crappy theme, but I’ve shoved way to many of my own hacks in there, and its probably not gonna change super-soon). Recently Flock has been my blogger of choice given its other awesome blog-conducive features, and generally awesome layout, but its still based on Firefox 1.5, and as such suffers from a spell check that I have to run to use, which is a silly, but major pain for a horrid speller like me. I think a 2.0 based version is soon, but its enough for me to hold flock off as a primary browser, and as such, it loses potential as a blogging editor. Unfortunately pretty much every other open source blog editor is either lacking in features (like tagging/pingbacks/accurate rendering of HTML) or so buggy that its not worth the trouble.

So here I am, slamming out a quickie blog post in Google Docs, composition has gone great, its easy to use, surprisingly robust, especially in some areas (like key bindings) where I didn’t expect a webapp to do such a nice job. In addition, while I was setting up my blog, I learned that Google Docs supports categories (not the easiest system, as you do have to leave the editor to tag the document, but it can happen, so that’s cool.) So far my two main issues with most editors have been met with a simple grace I’ve almost come to expect from Google. Now the fun part, I’m going to post this to see how Google does with the formatting component, so if you see this, and their is nothing below, I’m just writing, give me a few minutes, and I’ll catch up.

Update:

Wow, not a half bad job! It seems to do fine, and supports my theme well (I guess the Planets are another test, but I’m not gonna wait for them ). All said and done, Google did a nice job it seems. I know I didn’t try anything wild, but here are two sweet screenshots, one in Google Docs, and one on my Blog, since it all seemed to go nicely.

So see for yourself. One thing I feel Google kinda screwed themselves up on, is that I was forced to upload these photos to Google, I gladly would have hosted them or pawned them off on Flickr, but Google had no (visible to me at least) way of doing that through the interface (which is kinda the point). So they just added some pain to their servers, and whats worse, I’m way to lazy to thumbnail my own screenshots. (sorry!) I always just take that small size from Flickr….

Anyways, formatting issues anywhere else, or generally noticed, please post a comment, I promise I listen, and to all 10 people who read this, I would prefer if you could actually read it without hurting yourself.