Yesterday, I downloaded and installed Windows Live Writer (Beta) and everything worked swimmingly as long as one didn't wish to include images in the blog post. Unfortunately, one did want to import images. One has been wishing for an easier way to get images on the server and included in blog posts for quite some time.
Naturally, Community Server has not implemented the newMediaObject method of the MetaBlog API for importing images/media into the blog content repository. This is the preferred mechanism by which Windows Live Writer and other blog automation applications insert images into your posts. So I hopped over to the Community Server web site to see if anybody had hacked newMediaObject functionality on top of the MetaBlog web service (I would not be surprised if somebody had). Lo! Behold! Lo and Behold! I had somehow missed the fact that an upgrade to Community Server (ver 2.1) was now available! Hey, maybe the new upgrade would add functionality to the MetaBlog implementation!
So, I downloads, and I upgrades, and what do you know? I melt the blogs again. It wasn't so bad this time around. I eventually found I had screwed up a permissions issue that resulted in me getting a cryptic, and not so useful error message, along with a pile of events in the event log. Anyway, all that helpful advice referring to the ASPNET account in troubleshooting Community Server? This actually refers to the Network Service account when your blog server is running Windows Server 2003 as the underlying OS. I'm sure you wanted to know.
In summary, the blog server is back up and functioning, and nobody needed to raid the google cache of old versions of all the pages in order to rebuild the site like last time I melted the blog.