The Feed.Us Blog

Use Google Docs to update your website

By Rick Stratton, founder

The beauty of Feed.Us is utlizing the cloud and writing the content for your site where you feel most comfortable. Feed.Us imports from WordPress and email and RSS. And then feeds those posts to your site.

And Google Docs has been our white whale.

The “Documents” version of Google Docs used to support an RSS-like export called Metaweblog. Feed.Us used it to import documents from customers’ Google Docs accounts. It worked remarkably well.

Unfortunately, when Google updated Google Docs, they turned off the Metaweblog support. Which meant Feed.Us customers lost a very nice way to update their sites.

But they also added an API. And finally we implemented their API so that once again, our customers can use Google Docs to update their sites. YES.

Which is what I’m doing right now. Writing in Google Docs, much like WordPress.com, is a nice experience. I need extra motivation to keep posting to the Feed.Us blog, and writing in a Google Doc “Document” is just that kind of motivation.

When I’m done, I’ll just “share” the document with Feed.Us (FeedUsImport@gmail.com) and Feed.Us will import the article and add it to our blog.

There are a few negatives:

1. The API does not let us import Apps Google Docs users easily. It has something with the way the Apps users are username@domain.com. We're working on this and should have this fixed soon. (Update - this is fixed!)

2. Google puts a lot of crappy formatting around the text. We’re working to strip it all out so it’s just nice, clean HTML. (Hey everyone has issues, don't blame Larry & Sergey. Microsoft does a lot worse with Word and Wordpress doesn't do any formatting at all.)

3. Right now it's not two way, eventually if you update it in Feed.Us, it'll change it back at the original document.

4. It's just Google Docs Documents. You can't use a Spreadsheet to create a table.

Screenshot video: