I have been experimenting with Python as a scripting language to see whether it would be a good "swiss-army knife" for my programming.  (I already quite like Perl but am looking to see whether Python has some nice advantages -- such as its interactive mode, which from what I can see doesn't exist in Perl.)

At any rate, I've also been wanting to write some code to glue various applications I use on my Windows machine, specifically Ecco (my Personal information manager), M$ Word, and Manila.  Python seems like a natural choice in this case because of the existence of a COM server interface to Ecco ((http://www.ivitar.com/vbecco/), a COM interface to Microsoft Word, and a Python library for Manila (pyManila by Mark Pilgrim), and pythoncom, the Python library to use COM.

What exactly do I want to do with this glue code?  Here's a quick list:

• being able to write text in Microsoft Word (with bold, italics, URLs, sections) and translating the text into decent HTML and posting it to my blog (with a few keystrokes)
• being able to quickly post the references I gather in Ecco to my blog as news items.  (I gather references that I'd like to share with others but the extra work of posting to my blog is just enough to make me not post these materials.)
• having a desktop GUI interface to my Manila site would help manipulating the photo list much easier.  A drag-and-drop interface for uploading pictures would get me uploading photos more often.

I realize that others out there are doing all this work on the blogs without the benefit of automation tools -- I guess I'm just too lazy! 

The URL I'm posting here is my post trying to get help with a Python-COM issue I've run into.  For some reason, I can use Visual Basic and Perl to access the Ecco COM toolkit properly but my efforts with Python have failed so far.