I decided to give Windows Live Writer a try for posting to this blog. I’d used it before and thought it was a convenient way to makes posts without going through the browser interface. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t connect to this blog out-of-the-box. I’m posting the solution here for posterity.
The problem was this – when configuring the blog settings to connect, it kept telling me that xmlrpc.php was returning a 404 error. I verified over and over that the file was there and had the right permissions, etc.
In the end, I had to do two things:
1. Add these lines to my .htaccess file:
<Files xmlrpc.php>
SecFilterInheritance Off
</Files>
2. Turn on XML-RPC in WordPress in Settings->Writing->”Enable the WordPress, Movable Type, MetaWeblog and Blogger XML-RPC publishing protocols.”
Seems so easy, but #2 was what stumped me for a while. Well, that’s one hour of my life wasted, but hopefully by posting this I won’t hit the same problem again, and maybe someone else will benefit from my experience.