I think that most WordPress bloggers access the administration area on their blogs in order to compose and publish new blog posts, but there are a variety of other tools out there that you may want to consider as well. For example, some writers find that using Live Writer to compose and publish blog posts is easier, more user-friendly, and potentially more powerful. Similarly, there are mobile tools for publishing through an iPhone and other similar handsets.

Although only available to US publishers at this time, Yahoo! has also released a new tool that works from within Yahoo! Mail, letting you edit and publish new blog posts without ever leaving your Yahoo! Mail interface. Should this application turn out to be a relative success for Yahoo!, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we started to see similar solutions implemented in Gmail and Hotmail too.

In short, there is a WordPress application for Yahoo! Mail that is meant to work with both WordPress.com and WordPress.org-powered blogs. From within the Yahoo! Mail interface, you enter your credentials, compose blog posts, and publish them without ever entering the WordPress dashboard itself. You can also drag and drop email messages into the composer, instantly creating new blog posts based on these emails. Interestingly, there is only support for tags and not for categories at this time.

For more information and a brief walkthrough, check out this great post on weblogtoolscollection.com.