Lessons learned from writing my first blog post with google docs writer

As I did use different computers at home (mainly Ubuntu and Mac OS) to write the post, I did appreciate that the document was always online although I had sometimes (especially at the end, when the document was already quite big) problems with lost connections that caused loss of some changes. I didn't experienced this before with smaller documents so I assume that either Google Docs Writer is not yet capable of handling long documents having pretty nasty HTML code inside (see the point about the code listing below) or there had been connection problems caused by server problems. So I guess if I am about to write another similar post I might want to try a desktop application such as OpenOffice (with Sun Weblog Publisher extension) or I might want to separate the a bigger topic into several smaller posts (which would probably the best).

I shouldn't use the Styles "Header 1" or "Header 2" from Google Docs as they let to too big headlines in the blog post. Instead it would be better to use only the styles "Header 3" and "Normal paragraph". Furthermore, it seems that I need to manually add the title of the post afterwards in Blogger as I couldn't figure out a way to export from Google Docs directly.

In order to get syntax highlighting for source code listings (python and shell scripts in my previous post) I have searched for a free code editor that can export the code with syntax highlighted in either HTML or another format (such as RTF) that could be used in an office suite. I ended up using the export to RTF function of Notepad++ that is running via Wine on my Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy) machine. Afterwards, I opened the exported RTF-file with Open Office and copied it (via clipboard) into Google Docs. This whole procedure reached the goal of colored syntax highlighting of the included script source code, but the resulting HTML code was pretty huge and extremely difficult to edit manually (e.g. the background color was set in each little piece of text to white which looked pretty ugly in the post as my blog has a different background color so that I had to manually remove all these background color settings). I guess there must be a smarter way to get readable source code listings as I have seen in other articles but I haven't yet figured out a better way (recommendations are welcome ...).

Originally I had links in the Google Docs Writer document that referenced via bookmarks to the references chapter at the end of my post but all these "internal" links got broken after publishing into blogger (clicking them opened the document for editing in blogger - which only I as the document owner could do) so that I replaced them manually with links to the referenced web pages. I guess there should be a better way to add references to text within the same post (e.g. to different chapters) but I haven't yet figured out how to do this.

Some final comments: Overall, publishing a post from Google Docs to Blogger is pretty forward (just click the Publish button in Google Docs and follow the instructions) and the overall experience using Google Docs was quite good, so if you like to use a free online blog post writer – Google Docs can be recommended.