I've set up a link on my home page which authors can click to bring up the New Entry dialogue, avoiding the need to go to the Movabletype administrative page. (I have some technophobic authors.) That's easy. But I'd like to hide the link for browsers of the site who don't have author permissions, to make the experience a little less confusing for them.

There ought to be a way to query the cookie Movabletype sets when an author uses the "Remember Me" function to determine whether he/she has the appropriate permissions, but I can't find any info on how to do that.

Your authors may actually be happier using something like ecto or w.bloggar (there are a bunch more but those are the 2 at the top of my brain today). Then they can use a spiffy WYSIWYG editor and you won't need that link on your pages.