Gold Plated Blog Posts

Whatev.

• Topics:
• Picasa
• India
• Bumper Stickers
• Travel

Google is my CMS

I recently had a friend who needed a website for the high school football team he coaches. To help him out, I came up with a pretty inventive solution that suited everyone's needs. Maybe the solution is right for you too.

The site didn't need to be very complicated- no need for user logins or dynamic content- but it needed to be updated frequently. Neither of us wanted to get into a situation where he would come up with an update but have to send it to me to put it on the site. This would create unnecessary lag time and more ongoing work for myself than I wanted. Giving him access to a server where he would have to update HTML pages wouldn't work because Coach doesn't know HTML. So based on my experience with Blogger, I decided to create a Blogger account for the football team, which allows Coach to update the site whenever he wants. Using the API, though, I piped the content of the blog to different pages on the team's website so that you would never know it was a blog. The end result is ClevelandWarriorsFootball.com (thanks to Chris Fenison for the site design).

A typical blog would just display the most recent posts or list them by label. As you can see, this one is much different. Each page on the site grabs a single article by label and displays it inside a div. The home page grabs the most recent article labeled "home", the Contact page grabs the most recent article labeled "contacts", and so on. Things like Posted Date and Author aren't displayed, just the title and content. Take a look at the site's actual Blogger page (which I may take down at some point to maintain the "magic") to see that it's really just a normal blog. And it was doable in just a few lines of code thanks to Google's API.

Other Google services were also useful. The Offseason Schedule is just a Google Calendar inside an iframe, and the Pictures section is (or will be soon) content from the football team's Picasa account (using the Lightweight PHP Picasa API of course). We tried the rosters and other schedules as Calendar and Spreadsheet entries respectively but ultimately decided that using Blogger gave a cleaner look and more control over the data.

Google, and Blogger in particular, makes a great alternative to a very simple CMS or database solution. It offers a great user interface for creating new content- including formatted text, images, and video- along with a very flexible API for integration. It's a perfect solution for giving non-technical users power over their content while keeping you out of the loop. Now if only the team can live up to the site :P Go Warriors!