I have been preparing this weblog with Windows Live Writer (WLW), a free Microsoft beta-test tool. Why in the world would I use a tool still in beta test for real work? As Bob Frankston asked me one night twenty-odd years ago over pizza after a Boston Computer Society meeting when I was moaning about the instability of the latest OS/2 developer drop, "If it isn't beta, why run it?" I had some init I had some initial problems setting up WLW for my blog, because I was trying to be too clever about it, given the absence of documentation that typifies beta-test software: I tried giving WLW the Movable Type (MT) publishing platform page used for management of the blog, and then the URL used for the Movable Type API. What it really wanted, as I soon discovered, was simply the blog’s home display page. Once WLW had that and my login credentials, it not only figured out what URL to use for the MT API, it downloaded the site’s categories as well as its CSS and content for preview purposes.My second set of problems came when I tried to post an entry with a picture. It looked fine locally, but when I uploaded the entry the image did not display. When I looked at the entry online on the MT editing form, it was clear that the image path was messed up. I posted my image through the Web interface, fixed up the HTML on the editing form, and finally the entry displayed with the image as I intended.Then I went to the WLW forum and asked about the problem . Joe Cheng had it figured out within an hour, and once the administrator at InfoWorld edited the mt.cfg file for my blog, I could post entries with images.I write my entries before I post them, to give myself time to consider what I’ve said, and do an edit pass. Initially, I saved my drafts on the local hard disk of one of the computers in my office, and published them from there on my three-times-a-week schedule. I wanted to post drafts to the MT server, but the option to do that in WLW was grayed out. When I asked about that in the WLW forum, Joe explained why it was the case: “By default, Movable Type doesn’t support drafts from third-party clients, so we disabled it in Writer for Movable Type blogs. You would have to set NoPublishMeansDraft in mt.cfg to make it support drafts. If you’ve done this, then you can work around the problem in Writer by changing a registry key.”Once InfoWorld took care of the NoPublishMeansDraft setting, I figured out where in my computer’s registry I need to make the change, and got back to Joe privately. He explained that WLW has two providers for Movable Type: one for MovableType, the blog software by SixApart, and another for MovableType, the generic API documented by SixApart. The former is the default. Providers are identified in the registry by GUIDs; Joe gave me the GUID for the MT API provider, and once I put that in the registry I could post drafts.Once I could post drafts, I started setting their dates to the future time I wanted to publish them. MT has an option on its Web interface to set an entry’s status to Future instead of Draft; that tells the server to automatically publish them at the time set. Unfortunately, the old version of MT that InfoWorld currently runs isn’t smart enough to recognize that an entry posted from the MT API with a custom date in the future should be set to Future status, so I still have to post drafts from WLW, and set them to Future status using MT’s Web interface. It’s an extra step, but it works. Maybe that will be fixed the next time we upgrade our server: who knows? Software Development