I like to post an article to wordpress through Byword or Ulysses. And those tools use wordpress’s xmlrpc.php.
By the way if you use xmlrpc.php with your own server , you might face up to infinite attacks which target xmlrpc.php. And I horribly experience it.
If you want to independently operate your wordpress blog on your own server , I recommend to block xmlrpc.php access from anonymous users with the code below.
<FilesMatch "xmlrpc\.php$">
order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from [Your IP address] // Allow the only your ip address
</FilesMatch>
Put the code above into your .htaccess file in the root folder of wordpress.