Arteliance

I tried Google Docs way back when it was still Writely but had to abandon it when added features made it inaccessible on my old computer. This fall, after enrolling in a first year university French course, I decided to give Google Docs another try. The workflow turned out to be surprisingly simple and effective:

• Online storage gave me access to the documents at the college or at home
• Export as Word allowed me to email it to the professor in the format he preferred
  
• Google Docs can spell check in French without the rest of the page (or my whole computer) having to be in French
• Stored revisions make it easy to go back to previous versions of the document if I change my mind

By using tabs in Firefox I can easily flip back and forth between Google Docs, BonPatron and, if I’m really stuck, Google Translate to do my French writing assignments.

This is a summary of the settings I’ve tried so far:

	Title	Posted	Error Message	Update
MetaWeblog API	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Blogger API	No	Yes	No	Yes*
Movable Type API	Yes	Yes	Yes	No

* error message on update

I am trying this again in case it is related to server performance problems at blogsome.

Update: still no title. I wonder if there is a way to fix that?

Result: does not contain valid XML and it didn’t update even after about 15 minutes.

Update: trying the Moveable Type API that it gives for Wordpress on the Common APIs and URLs page.

Result: Server response does not contain valid XML but it posted fine (and with a title). Now to test updating posts from Writely with these settings…. Apparently because of the error message Writely doesn’t recognize the document as “blogged” so it doesn’t give me the option to update.

I am writing this in Writely using Markdown syntax (in blogsome that plugin has to be activated). How will it turn out?

Update: It turned out perfectly (except that it used the default category). Now I wonder if I can update posts the same way?

Update 2: Looks like it just makes a new post rather than updating the previous one. Also it adds in <br /> tags and gives an error for invalid XML sent but the post goes through anyway.

Update 3: I tried this again with the correct settings for blogsome i.e. using the Blogger API as per Writely Help but it still doesn’t update or remove posts and the post has no title.