How do I import an external HTML file's text into a page on my Blogger blog?

Question

I want to include an APA-style reference list as an unordered list in a Page on my Blogger blog (now called Google Blogs?). I do not want to type it directly on the Page, for several reasons:

1. I want to be able to store and update the file locally, which means saving it on my computer and uploading it with a third-party application such as Dreamweaver. That way I don't need to have an internet connection to read it or modify it.
2. I want to upload the reference list to my personal website and link to it from other personal web pages. Visitors of my website won't have to be taken to my blog, and my blog readers won't have to leave the domain blogspot.com. This increases navigational fluency and privacy.

I thought of multiple approaches to this problem:

First, I'd love to use PHP include(), but Blogger doesn't support PHP right now. I believe Server-Side Include also won't work.

Second, I tried using an <object> element, and with a few adjustments of width and height, it looks sufficient. However, since the HTML text from the imported file is not technically included on the Blogger page, it does not appear to implement Blogger styles, nor do the IDs transfer. This is very important to me, as I include navigational IDs (using # in URL) in my links to the reference page, which is a very long list, so that readers can be taken directly to the correct reference citation. As an element, the # IDs do not exist in the Blogger page's code.

The third option is to convert my entire reference document into a JavaScript file with each line containing document.write(), which seems a little much. Ane even so, I'm not sure styles and IDs would convert.

There's got to be an easier way. Any suggestions?

See my original question on the Blogger help forum.

Answer 1

I'm not sure why you want to keep this content separately from the rest of the blog. Blogger has been supporting non-blog pages for several years now. If you want your content to be displayed on every page, you can add a widget with that content.

If you, after all, still want the content to be hosted externally, Blogger supports <iframe /> tag at least on non-blog pages. Here's tag reference from W3Schools.org.

Answer 2

Just checking I've understood this properly: you want to have a list format file for which you keep the master version locally, and edit it with tools on your desktop. From time to time, at intervals of your choosing, you do "something" that uploads the updated version of this file to your blog, and your website. (Because, you don't keep your desktop on-line all the time so that it can act as the host that the page loads from.) Is that right?

If it is, then with Blogger an option to use some local tool that generates either HTML or Javascript, and at upload time you will need to copy-and-paste the output from this into the edit-HTML window of Blogger's pages editor.

FYI, I've done something similar with some book listings: I use Excel as my local tool, because I want the data as a "database" format for other purposes, and Excel formulas can be used to generate HTML (see http://blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com/2011/10/using-excel-to-make-html-for-body-of.html)

Another option is to generate a PDF file from your local tool, load it to a file host that gives embed code (Docs used to, but I couldn't find the option last time I looked, I think that Scribd does), and put the embedded code to display it on your blog page. I'm not sure if this PDF format would maintain the internal reference links, though. And if your host gave the file a new name every time you uploaded a new version, then you would probably have to edit the Blogger page every time too (tedious).