My blog is now generated by Google Docs

Welcome to my new blog! This is going to be a bit of an experiment for me. I have wanted to set up a blog for quite some time now but I never wanted to host my blog on some other website like medium (call it a vanity thing but I like seeing my name in that URL). I also didn’t really want to set up something like wordpress because that felt a little overkill. I could have set up a static site generator like Jekyll but then I would have had to have done a bit more styling with markdown than I’d really like.

That’s when a friend’s idea popped back into my mind. Why not just use Google docs as a “CMS”?

So this is what this page is. My first short blog post coming straight to you from Google docs. It’s not particularly complicated to set up either (it can be set up over the weekend). You can find the code over here:

https://gitlab.com/BenWiser/googledocsblog

There are a few reasons why I like this approach. For one, it’s pretty simple to manage. I have a Blog folder on Google drive for all of my posts. If I want to hold off publishing something I move it into a different folder. If I want to do a write up but my partner is using our shared laptop, I jump on the iPad. And if I do eventually decide to move onto some actual CMS, well I’d rather copy over content from a text processor than from something like wordpress (I really don’t like wordpress).

Time will tell if this approach works out but all I can say is it is pretty cool.