First of all, the reason that Pyrite BlogAuthor didn't ping the trackbacks associated with the Categories had nothing to do with Pyrite BlogAuthor. It was MovableType's fault.
After digging through MovableType code for an hour or so (and seriously considering scooping my eyes out with a spoon as an alternative) I found the problem. publishPost, the MovableType specific XMLRPC method, doesn't ever request that the items to be pinged are pinged. Here's how you can fix it. Open mt/lib/XMLRPCServer.pm. Find sub publishPost. Look for the line that starts with SOAP::Data_type. Just ABOVE it, add the following:
$mt->ping_and_save( Entry => $entry) or die _fault("Ping and Save failed: " . $mt->errstr);
That's it. If you use any XMLRPC based blogging client (like w.bloggar and friends) you'll find that this should fix your problems as well. Unfortunately, I don't know what other horrible ramifcations this might have. It might send email to your mom and tell her that you masturbate for all I know. However, it seems to work for me.
Pyrite BlogAuthor is very nice. The only thing I don't like about it is that, when specifying categories, one has to use the category ID as opposed to the category name. One might consider this to be the fault of MovableType and their poorly designed XMLRPC interface. However, at the expense of taking a little bit longer to post an entry, I managed to patch my copy to allow for specifying categories by name.
I don't know Python, so I'm certain someone more seasoned than myself could do a better job. However, if anyone is interested, I'll do a diff between my source and the CVS tree so you can implement the changes as well.
