I’ve just set up Windows Live Writer to edit my blog posts. Despite what I have read in various postings this desktop blog editing software integrated seamlessly with my Drupal blog (including photo uploads). This worked with both Windows 7 Starter on my Acer AspireOne netbook and in Windows XP Pro on my Dell 390 workstation.

At the time of this writing my blog is set up on Drupal 6.17 and has the core optional Blog API module activated, so you don’t need to install any special modules for this to work. Based on the posts I have read the integration may not have worked with earlier versions of Drupal 6; therefore it might be a good idea to update your core before trying this if you have not done so already.

In the setup just choose Movable Type API as the blog provider and use http://yoururl.com/xmlrpc.php as the access script.

I allowed the program to download my theme so that I get a real WYSIWYG experience. Also the application allows you to add taxonomy terms directly from you desktop.

Unfortunately I have not found a way to edit my meta tags or url aliases from my desktop, so for now my procedure is to edit the post on the desktop and then save a draft to my blog. Then I go ahead and login to my site and set these items up in the admin.

Windows Live Writer is available as free download and is part of the Windows Live Essentials suite. You  can download it also as a stand alone here.