So I read a few interesting posts from people who were talking about how easy Windows Live Writer (link to site) to publish not only to their blogs, but how it could also be used to publish content to Graffiti CMS (link to site) since Graffiti supports the MetaBlog API (info).  So I go to the site and download the installer and wasn't too happy with what I saw when I tried to install the program.

Isn't that just wonderful.  Here I find something that might make offline editing easier and the program doesn't want to be installed on Windows 2003.  Now I realize that most people out there don't use a server OS on their PC for daily usage, but since I have been working with ALUI for the last year, it just makes more sense to me to have the target OS installed where I am doing my development work.

Fortunately, a few minutes searching Google and I ran across several sites where people encountered similar issues.  Soon enough I found one that linked me to a German site (link) that had an English msi installer for Windows Live Writer 2008 (scroll to the end of the page for the English msi).  I downloaded and ran the installer, and didn't get any error about it not liking the OS. As a matter of fact, I didn't get much of anything regarding the progress of the installer.  I ran it, and the dialog went away after a few seconds with no additional messages.  So at first I'm thinking it was a bad installer (or worse, a virus or trojan that McAfee didn't catch), but I looked on my start menu & noticed a new folder for "Windows Live" containing the shortcut to the newly installed Windows Live Writer.

So I open the program & followed the steps outlined on the Graffiti site to configure it properly, and I am happy to say that this post was actually published using the tool.