written by
Alan Richardson

Using Blogger as a Primary Channel in StoryChief

talotics.com 2 min read

I managed to get my static site publishing workflow working using StoryChief. Next, I needed to get my blogger workflow working. At the moment you can't use Blogger as a primary channel, but I can use my stub api to allow me to publish 'as if' Blogger was a primary channel and control the canonical URL of the StoryChief posts so that Blogger is the Canonical post.

StoryChief supports 'primary' platforms where your post should appear, then it will post to secondary platforms. The 'primary' platforms control the canonical URL.

Unfortunately blogger is listed as a 'secondary' platform so I can't post directly to it.

Fortunately, using the stub api that I build to support my static sites I can almost use blogger as a primary channel.

  • write the post in storychief, or offline and paste it in
  • add the date and a blogger url into my custom fields
    (this is the custom permalink url I will want to use)
  • publish with storychief to my primary (stub) and blogger (secondary)
  • I can then go off to blogger and amend the custom permalink to be the one I added as a custom field (my canonical url)
    (or copy the link that was created when story chief published and use that as the custom field value)
  • setup my other channels e.g. facebook, twitter, medium etc. and republish

I could use the storychief blog as my primary channel, but then the canonical link for blogger (or medium etc) would not be set correctly. The stub api I created helps me workaround that minor limitation in StoryChief

I suspect many people may have not used StoryChief because it doesn't support blogger or Medium as primary channels. Which is a pity because it has a lot of useful features.

At some point StoryChief say they will support blogger and medium as primary channels and I may no longer have to use my stub.

If you are technical enough to understand my stub api post then you could use blogger, static sites, medium etc. as your primary channel and gain benefits from all the other features in StoryChief.

In this workflow, if I use the StoryChief editor to create the post, then I still want to update my offline or static sites with the content. I copy and paste the relevant generated html from the StoryChief blog into the TurnDown HTML to Markdown convertor.

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