Well, I figured out why NetNewsWire and ecto both had difficulties when posting to this blog. Turns out that when one of my plugins, the one powering the hourly weather updates, was installed, rebuilding after a post from either of these programs would fail to complete. Pings weren’t done, and in NNW’s case, no category info was posted.
I don’t yet know what the plugin is doing to cause these failures. I’m reporting the problem to the author, and since I like my hourly weather updates, I’m going to leave the plugin active and post via the MT submission form (though I will probably edit using ecto or NNW). You can find out more about the plugin at the plugin author’s site, here and here.
I don’t know how you have your weather plug-in set up, but one thing you could try and do is to remove the data rebuild out of your main index. In other words, create a separate template for the weather information, saving it out to a file, called, say ‘weather.inc’. Then in your main index template, you can use MTInclude to include that file (I use PHP include because I want finer control over it.) Have your hourly crontask only update the weather.inc file, and leave your main index alone. As far as NNW and ecto is concerned, they won’t have to worry about having to rebuild the weather data as well, just your index.
See if that helps.