I know I’ve written about the beta Windows Live Writer program before, but this thing is truly awesome. Once in a while, a program comes along that seems like it just works like “magic” and this is definitely one of them. I’m sure there are various blogging XMLRPC API’s that it uses, but it amazes me how it can pick up the look and feel of your blog, and present it to you while you’re creating a post.

There was a slight hickup while using it with Movable Type. First of all,  you have to point it at your admin interface. For my blogs, my admin interface has an entirely different URL than the viewing interface. Second of all, for XMLRPC-based posting, MT maintains a separate password for each author, which can be set in the author configuration screen.

Also, while Live Writer can set the categories for your post, it doesn’t seem to support MT tags yet. It does let you specify tags specific to a partiuclar service, for example:

But that’s just some magic templated text, not something it’s doing with the MT API. Oh well, hopefully they’ll get that in some future version. I can always post first and tag later.