Tuesday 26 October 2010

A Little Blog Test

I've been able to upload and link to certain types of files from a blog, but a friend just asked if it was possible to upload a Word doc or Excel spreadsheet for her readers to download. I wasn't sure if Blogger allowed for this, so I figured I would test it out.

So here I am in Blogger composing a new post, and I'm looking for a place to upload a text. I can insert an image or a video, but don't see a place for uploading a file. Do you? (In theory, you should be able to click on these images to enlarge them. Unfortunately, Blogger seems to have shrunk them in the upload process. I apologize if it's hard to make out the details.)


I figured I could try uploading the doc as an image, but that was rejected right away.


In the end, the only way I could figure to link to a downloadable file was to upload the file to an outside server, or to use another blogging platform. WordPress does allow media uploads, including several kinds of word processing files. I was pleased to see the *.odt format used by OpenOffice was among them! Here's a peek at how it works if I wanted to offer a file for download from my WordPress writing blog: