So like a lot of other bloggers, I'm really liking Windows Live Writer (WLW) for posting to my blog.  For some reason I was always too cheap to fork out the $$$ for BlogJet which most say is the leader is this particular area.  So WLW is a pretty nice free blog editor with some very useful plugins. 

One of the things that does bug me about it though is the fact that, by default, I can't save my drafts in a location other than My Documents\My Weblog Posts\Drafts.  Since I don't use the My Documents folder structure for anything, this does me no good.  I know, I know, just redirect the location of My Documents to the location of my choosing.  Just something about prefixing everything with "My" gives me the VB heeby jeebies.  :)

(Besides, I've set up a portable, synchronized work environment allowing me to use my same portable apps and same documents across different PCs using FolderShare.)

So after much googling without an answer I fired up my handy dandy Reflector to confirm my suspicion that the path is indeed hard-coded based off the Environment.SpecialFolder.Personal folder as shown below...

So my workaround is to simply create a blank .wpost file in my own "drafts" folder, (for me it's at d:\joey\documents\blog posts\drafts) and just create copies of that to use for new blog posts.

Notice I've marked the file named "New Post.wpost" with the read-only attribute to keep me from accidentally altering it.  And I've made a copy of it and opened it up in WLW.  The nice thing about this is that when you open a .wpost file directly from Windows Explorer into WLW, when you save, it will save it in that location instead of trying to save it in the default Drafts folder.  Another nice thing is that it will automatically rename the .wpost file to match the title you give the post in WLW. 

The downside to this approach is WLW won't show your drafts in its sidebar, since that only looks at the default My Weblog Posts\Drafts folder.

So hopefully Microsoft will make the save locations configurable (like every other Office app) as WLW comes out of beta so this kind of nonsense is not necessary.