Recovering Windows Live Writer Files | Hacker News Reader

Recovering Windows Live Writer Files

benovermyer.com

20 pointsbovermyer9 comments

So, I asked Cursor to make for me a Python script to turn those .wpost files into Markdown files. And... it did. In the first pass.

Probably because the source code of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Live_Writer at https://github.com/OpenLiveWriter/OpenLiveWriter was in its training data.

Valid. AI is so good that I reach for it even before doing basic searches. It's now easier to have it write a program than search for one, install it, and learn how to use it.

1/10 low effort

I wonder if it supposedly knows the code so well, is it possible to use Cursor to make a port to Avalonia or some other cross-platform GUI toolkit for C#.

However it came to the "knowledge," I'm glad it had it!

Seeing as I know almost nothing about reverse engineering, in this case, an LLM was a great tool in solving the problem. Yes, I could have spent the time and energy to do it myself, but this seemed like a good use case for an LLM.

There are other problem sets where I'm not using LLMs at all - like porting a lot of my procedural generation code from Typescript to Godot's GDScript.

Amazingly open live writer seems to be a very active project that is getting ready for a new release sometime soon!

It is sad that these sort of local apps are a thing of the past. It is all every changing web UIs. One of the blogging platform I use (hashnode) recently rewrote their entire experience and it is now 5 types of broken and they removed a bunch of features. (Their latest company announcement saying that "focusing on blogging was a mistake" also doesn't inspire confidence...)

I'm also hosting a Hugo blog, and using a markdown editor, but the blog posting workflow (edit markdown, run Hugo command from cli, commit and push to GH, webhook on server picks up changes and updates the website) isn't exactly a user friendly experience and even having an editor that automated that all away would be nice.

Hey remember local image management software? Or just owning our data in general?

> Their latest company announcement saying that "focusing on blogging was a mistake" also doesn't inspire confidence

Well, the original quote is:

>> Hashnode started with forums. Discussions were how this community began. We discontinued them years ago to focus on blogging. That turned out to be the wrong call.

Focus is on "discontinuing forums". But yeah, the framing gave me a chuckle.

Still reads as if the blogging part they feel bad about.

The platform got a rep for blog spam instead of being a medium competitor, which sucks because Hashnode has really good inline code syntax highlighting (why I picked them).

Unfortunately I can't submit and of my blog posts to HN because the entire domain is blacklisted... :/

I remember porting or making plugin that allowed scripting in c# for OLW. (Dynamic Live Writer).

Good times.

Contrary to the author, I was able to export my blog from livehournal to cms blogengine.net and then migrate to WyAm static website generator and host on netlify.

Then, for many years, I was procrastinating and not using my blog properly. When i wanted to blog, I used substack instead :(

But finally, last week, I used Claude code and Gemini to migrate from WyAm to its successor Statiq, then fix formatting and other issues in blog.

Then I even managed to use Google takeout to download original photos, match them with images used in the blog using conceptual hashing, and replacing blog images with originals where it makes sense. (Replaced IMG SRC with IMG SRC set for diff resolutions).

Migrated blog from netlify to local selfhosting (old laptop with proxmox) behind cloudflare.

All this herculean effort was so fun, easy and enjoyable because of LLMs!

I am totally sold on LLMs now.

By the way, blog is in Russian, mostly about travels: https:/izvne.com.

Next step for using LLMs: port local pool-like Latvian game Novuss to open silverlight, improve it and publish.

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