I've been blogging forever it seems, I'm not overly proficient at writing and such but I do so enjoy doing it every now and then. I guess I started when I started to get into doing stuff online that wasn't just consuming but was creating, either words or client/server scripts.
I've had a Gmail account since not long before they became available - though by invitation only to start with, and you only had 5 invites to give away! I got one and my kids got one each and they've got really rather cool addresses as such!
So the point is that I've been pondering leveraging my Gmail account (and subsequent access to Google Docs) and my scripting and writing into one thing. Once Google added the ability to serve content from your Google Docs account (something I've written about a couple of times before (Easy menus on vanilla hosting (GDrive or site44) and Multi-level Bootstrap Menu on GDrive or site44)) I was set as I didn't need to involve any server side scripting (Not that I don't want to do more PHP, but why not use JavaScript as much as you can). I knew that a Google Docs spreadsheet could act as a data source and the pages could be hosted on Google Drive so I've spent the last weekend getting my head around what I needed to do and the result is https://googledrive.com/host/0ByRgQIhodQXfaVdHOElsZTV5c3c/driveblog/. I'm also putting the code (which is after all just JavaScript so available when you view the source) on GitHub (https://github.com/annoyingmouse/GDB)so that other people can hopefully take advantage of my work and, even more hopefully, improve it!
It uses Twitter Bootstrap for the basic layout as it's just so bloody easy to get started using it and I've borrowed ideas from a html5 Doctor. I also love JS-Render so I'll be using that as much as possible.
The content of the posts is Base64 encoded (using Opinionated Geek's base64encode online tool) when it's entered into the spreadsheet and I guess I should open that up too so that you can copy the structure: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AiRgQIhodQXfdGZ5OV9INlNRME9YUnc2VUhmRGtPaVE&usp=sharing. It's simply a question then of adding the key to the script and you should be away!
I've a couple of other things posted on GitHub. The Canal Lock one is lovely so please have a look at that as well if you fancy! I've updated the Pretty Time one but haven't uploaded it as yet - I'll have to fix that!
The next step is to use something to make adding new content, perhaps using the Base64 code I've included from webtoolkit and Bootstrap-wysiwyg...? Of course, that might require some server-side scripting to put the post on a new line of the Spreadsheet. Comments should be easy enough to do as well I reckon as I can just put them on a new sheet of the Spreadsheet and refer back to the id of the post...
No comments:
Post a Comment