I took Chris Pratley’s suggestion and played with OneNote’s Publish features, using as a sample last Thursday evening’s fern discovery expedition.  Publish worked great, saving the page in MHTML (a multi-part HTML package with embedded images).  OneNote preserved the layout nicely, which is pretty impressive given HTML’s limitations as a document layout format.

However, MSN Groups serves up the resulting .mht poorly - IE doesn’t seem to recognize the format and display the results correctly.  (I have no idea if other browsers even support this format.)  You can right-click and download the file to your local machine and browse it just fine, but that’s rather inconvenient and raises security suspicions.

The MTHML can be converted to plain old HTML fairly easily in IE by selecting File/Save As…/Web Page Complete.  The resulting multiple files require a bit more work to upload to MSN Groups, but the results actually work (always a good thing.)  Would be nice to have a direct Save As…/Web Page Complete or equivalent in the next version of OneNote.

[Update 14 June: Well, that didn't work as well as I thought.  The simplest "My Documents" option on MSN Groups isn't publicly viewable.  Creating a new group with public permissions still required an MSN account to view - unacceptable for my purposes.  When I moved the files back to my own ISP account, and updated the links in my blogs, I found the Save as/Web Page Complete didn't preserve relative locations, and mangled the names to make direct access through a browser impossible.  Had to do some hand-editing.  Looks like I have to up the priority of my request that OneNote export clean HTML directly.]

Well, I’ve been hacking at this space for a month now (my first post was May 12), and I’m finding MSN Spaces to be an adequate tool.  It does have a few minor limitations though (modulo luser error):

1. Images aren’t in-line.  As often my text and images are co-dependent, it would be nice to have the ability to embed a full-size (within limits) image in-line with the text.  Thumbnails at the end of the article are just too limiting.  If I switch to a different blog tool, this missing feature will be the reason.
2. Upload sizes and types are limited.  You can’t upload a large image (like this OneNote screenshot from a previous blog entry).  You can only upload images - uploading a raw OneNote file or XML file needs a different tool.  I understand this is a photo-album tool but it would be convenient not to have to go completely out of MSN Spaces to provide non-image supporting data.  However, MSN provides an automatic "My Web Documents" on MSN Groups for just this purpose.
3. No direct HTML control.  I have had some problems cutting and pasting from other tools (Outlook email, OneNote) and retaining too much formatting information.  I understand the need to prohibit arbitrary HTML though - perhaps a "strip formatting" button would be sufficient (though I’d still love to sticking <IMG> tags to overcome the in-line image problem.)
4. No list of recent posts.  When I visit someone’s blog, it’s nice to see at a glance which recent posts I might be interested in, or haven’t read yet.  I guess I could try using a custom list for this, but the manual maintenance required for a feature that should be simply automatic is dampening my enthusiasm.  I thought I would miss not having a little calendar view as well showing which days have posts, but I’m starting to feel this is more useful for the blogger than for his readers.

I really like the photo transitions in the photo albums, the ability to pick a theme and have it enforced (I’m willing to give up some creative control for that simplicity), and the general high quality of the reader and blogger experience.

All in all I’m finding blogging a fun way to keep in contact with family and friends, to hone my writing skills, and to have a reason to take a random spark of an idea and fan it to a flame by thinking it through in writing.