Use XMLRPC for custom content-type & Windows Live Writer?

Hi all:

I am working with a client who had another Drupal shop develop their website but I've taken it over because of my business experience in their industry. They are a primarily a print publisher that sells advertising, and they have a content-type called "article" where they post most of their web content.

They have been entering their article content in essentially raw text; for example to create a heading they just enter as upper case characters instead of using <h2> or <h3> tags. In discussions with them I've learned that the publisher/editor would rather not have his editorial staff have to learn HTML. One option is to move to FCKEditor or similar, but I've had so little luck with that myself that I'd hate to hoist it onto a markup-phobic client.

Which brings me to consider recommending they use Windows Live Writer. WLW is an absolutely brilliant free blog editor from Micro$oft that balances just the right amount of simplicity with just the right about of features and it can post blogs to Drupal. Unfortunately, however, it can only post to the 'blog' content-type and no other.

So what I want to do is write a module or whatever else I need to write to get it to post to the "article" content type instead. That seems like it should be fairly easy but I've looked at the code and it is anything but obvious. I'm pretty such I'd need to use hook_xmlrpc() but at this point I have no clue what the PHP module would look like.

Can anyone help me with this? I have written fairly complex modules before but I don't know how to debug a request that doesn't come from the browser. Seems like a module to support posting any content type using Windows Live Writer would be a stellar module to add to Drupal, and I'd be happy to contribute my work to the community if only someone who knows what needs to be done can help me with some sample code and point me in the right direction.

I'm sure given enough time I could figure it out but the client wants results sooner than later so I don't have the luxury of spelunking down in the code for a week trying to figure it out.

Thanks in advance for any help.