Using GDrive for publishing Newsletters

Using Google Drive for publishing Newsletters

I am connected with editing two newsletters: 1. AOSC Newsletter for Association of Senior Citizens of Hyderabad 2) Abhilash – A quarterly Newsletter of Senior Citizens Forum, Secunderabad. I am also responsible for uploading them regularly into the websites of these Associations hosted at weebly.com with URLs as below:

http://aosc-h.weebly.com/

http://scf-secunderabad.weebly.com/

For accomplishing the above task, I find Google Drive very useful. In my GDrive, I have created suitable Folders for storing the monthly or quarterly issues of these newsletters. I have shared these FOLDERS with public – in such a manner that anyone with URL for the folder can access them.

In the websites proper, I have given a link to the public URL for the folder.

This way is elegant and advantageous in many ways. Gdrive takes care of presenting the Folder to the user neatly  with thumbnail sketches of the files; It also gives special readers for file types like: Google Doc, MsWord, pdf etc. All you need to do regularly is just to upload the new file every month or quarter into relevant Gdrive Folder. Some website hosting companies may give limited space for storing your files. This is especially true if you using free hosting services. In such cases free space in Gdrive comes handy.

I keep a copy of Gdrive on my hard disk. Automatic synchronization between the Gdrive in Google and my hard disk copy is taken care of by Google. Therefore all I need to do, after creating final version of the newsletter, is to copy the file into local Gdrive. Everything else is taken care of – I don’t even need to specifically upload a new issue!

One problem I have noticed in Gdrive File Upload is this. When you upload some MsWord file into Gdrive, you may keep it as MsWord file or convert it into GDrive doc format. Sometimes the paragraph alignment or other formatting features may get disturbed. End result may not be what you want. This is more likely to happen if your Word File is tightly packed that when there is difference in the page size in MsWord and Google Doc default do not match. To avoid this mishap I always convert MsWord File into pdf. WORD 7 has in built facility to save a document as pdf. Even

Otherwise, free file converters like zamzam are available.

To see the relevant newsletters of AOSC-H are presented to the reader, try:

http://aosc-h.weebly.com/newsletters.html and click the link: All Issues of Newsletters for 2015