First, you need to setup your Google Spreadsheet. Create a new spreadsheet and set it up similarly to this one:
Then select File>Publish to the Web. You can select which sheets to publish. I have chosen just to publish the first sheet, as this works best. Make sure "Automatically republish when changes are made" is checked. This feature continuously updates the feed every time you make a change. (Note: Sometimes it does take a few minutes to update.) Click "Start Publishing" to begin. If you ever want to stop updating, you can click "Stop Publishing." (Note: you can manually update your feed by clicking "Republish now" if you need to.)
Under "Get a link to the published data," select "ATOM." Then select "List" and leave the default "All cells." If you select "Cells" then each individual cell will show up as a separate RSS item.
The "List" feature selection will publish each row as a separate RSS feed item. More on this below...
Grab a copy of the link Google generates. You'll use this link on IFTTT.
If you copy and paste the link into your browser, it will look like a mess (unless you look at it in Internet Explorer or some browser that sees RSS feeds easily).
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| Viewing in Chrome, it looks like a mess, because it's just raw RSS code... |
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| Viewing in Internet Explorer, it looks nice, since it is formatted properly as a RSS feed |
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| The original Google Spreadsheet |
A few things to note: If you look at your feed in IE to see it properly formatted and compare it to your Google Spreadsheet, you'll notice that the cell in A2 will be the title of your item and that the contents of cell B2 will be your post's content. The Google Spreadsheet actually mashes all contents past column B into the content. So, if you also had content in cell C2, that would show up together with the B2 cell's contents in the post's content. You'll also notice that the contents of row 1 act as a title row. So for the content section of the post, it takes the title from B1 and prepends that to the contents of B2 to form the post's content. Same thing with C1 and C2, D1 and D2, etc. All your posts will get the row 1 title prefix. If you leave row 1 empty to avoid this, Google will add some funky code that will not look attractive. So pick a simple, short title for your content and live with that. Lastly, note that usually you'll have to do HTML code to make links work properly in Blogger.
One more very important thing to note. This time look at the raw code from the feed, as seen in the messy Chrome version. You'll notice (though I've blocked it out for my privacy) that the link for that feed shows up several times, as does your Google username, and Google email address. This might be a privacy concern to you, so I would just suggest that you keep the address for this feed private. This really won't be a problem because IFTTT will be the only one knowing about your feed and will convert the feed into Blogger/Twitter code, discarding the original feed link and your username and email.
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| Viewing in Chrome, it looks like a mess, because it's just raw RSS code... |
Now, login to your IFTTT.com account. Create a new recipe of a Feed updating your Blogger (or your Twitter, if you prefer).
For the feed address, use the link provided by Google Spreadsheet's Publish to Web and set the Trigger to "New Feed item."
Now you will setup your Action. The "Feed" option on IFTTT is rather limited as a Trigger, so I've had to improvise on what to use for my post contents. You'll notice that I've set "EntryTitle" to be the title of my Blogger post. This corresponds to the A2 cell on my spreadsheet, which is the title of the feed item as seen in the IE screenshot. For the Blogger post's Body I've used "EntryContent" which corresponds to cell B2 on my spreadsheet (or the mashup of B2 and C2 if you have contents in C2). This is the content part of the feed as seen in IE.
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| Viewing in Internet Explorer, it looks nice, since it is formatted properly as a RSS feed |
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| The original Google Spreadsheet |
Test your IFTTT trigger (hit the manual refresh button for IFTTT if you need to). Then checkout your Blogger blog. It should now have a new post which is made up from your Google Spreadsheet.
Now any time you want to update your blog, just add a new line to your spreadsheet with your new post. Note: I have had some difficulty with it posting correctly if I delete the earlier rows in the spreadsheet, so it's probably easiest just to keep adding new rows with the new posts. If you do delete the old rows, you can manually refresh IFTTT and that seems to fix it to update properly from then on. Your spreadsheet should update its RSS feed within a few minutes, and IFTTT will check for a new feed item every 15 minutes, and use that new post to create a new Blogger post.
You could also easily set up this method to post to Twitter. On IFTTT, just set up your Action to be Twitter instead of Blogger. In that case, you can ignore the labels altogether! Unless you want to use the spreadsheet name with an added hashtag to make Twitter tags. In my case, I have IFTTT update Twitter from my Blogger feed using a separate recipe, so I have no need of this.
Take away: you can use Google spreadsheets to automatically update your Blogger or Twitter feeds. Or you could just update them the old fashioned way and ignore all this junk!
Hope you learned something. Enjoy!
