Slacking off a little on the weekend...
I've ended up doing a post a day almost by accident, as part of playing with Android blogging clients (it's not like there's a shortage of random ideas to write about...) Today I'm being a little lazy and using a full sized laptop keyboard (Thinkpad T60p) rather than continuing to torment my thumbs - but I figured I'd at least try desktop clients instead of directly using the website.
First try was kblogger - that was short-lived, the version in Karmic simply crashes when you try to tell it about a new blog (and the sophisticated auto-report-bug says "traceback is useless", which actually looks accurate as it only contained _start.)
Next thought was "ok, there's bound to be something for emacs, digging around a bit turned up g-client which is an entire suite of googley toys, and some surprisingly brutal blogging support - M-x gblogger-new-entry prompts for a post-URL and a title, and then gives you a buffer full of XML. (Not that I have a problem with that, but it ties directly back to my point about minimizing resistance being what distinguishes blogging from writing HTML pages in an editor.)
So while it is a little "raw", it's working out pretty well; perhaps this will become my default when I'm not specifically trying to use the phone. It's certainly a good starting point for adding other hooks, and might be a lazy starting point for figuring out how to muck with the Atom Publishing Protocol more directly...
Three minor followups, added later: