I learned about a nice, freeware blogging tool from doing a “corporate blog” at work- Windows Live Writer. For quite some time, I’ve been annoyed with the slow performance of WordPress’ web interface editor (though I have high speed internet, it’s wireless-all we can get out here, and it’s not that fast).
Windows Live Writer allows you to compose your post locally on your machine, and copy/paste in photos smoothly and quickly, and modify their properties all in the same window. Once the post is ready, it automatically publishes to your favorite blogging site. And it supports multiple blogs, if you have them. I find using this tool makes writing blog posts go MUCH faster!
If you download the install, feel free to un-check all of the items in the install list except for Live Writer, if you don’t need the extra stuff.