How to post from an external script

I want to write a script that will let some trusted individuals post brief news items to a WP blog via a web page and script that’s external to WP. Currently this script sticks the items into a MySQL db, so I could have a cron job that updates WP from the db or just have the script interact with WP directly.

Question is how to accomplish this on the WP side. I saw this post where a responder suggested making a feed out of the posts and using the WP-o-matic plugin. Maybe that’s the best way to do it, but it seems like a bit of a kludge to me.

I’m an experienced Perl coder so I’m not afraid of getting my hands dirty. Can someone point me in the right direction?

TIA…Steve