April 19, 2026
Blog necromancy, hold my .wpost
Recovering Windows Live Writer Files
AI resurrects lost blog posts, sparks open‑source credit war and nostalgia riot
TLDR: An AI-assisted script turned old Windows Live Writer files into readable posts with their images, reviving lost blogs. Commenters clash over whether to credit AI or open-source code, while nostalgia warriors demand real desktop apps and roast today’s buggy web editors—because digital history (and our notes) matter
A blogger just dug up decade-old posts from Microsoft’s extinct Windows Live Writer, using an AI coding assistant to whip up a script that turned abandoned .wpost files into readable stories—with images. The crowd cheered… then immediately split into teams. On one side, skeptics like userbinator say the “AI miracle” was more like reading the answers in the back of the book, noting the code for Open Live Writer is public and on GitHub. Translation: cool recovery, but don’t crown the robot just yet. On the other side, nostalgics are crying over the death of desktop apps. com2kid laments today’s “ever-changing web” where one site rewrite turned a favorite platform into “five types of broken,” and even claims Open Live Writer is gearing up for a comeback. Meanwhile, theragra drops a humblebrag: they migrated their old blog the old-fashioned way—no AI needed—before confessing to years of procrastination. The mood? A perfect storm of digital archaeology, credit politics, and “bring back real apps” energy. The recovered posts are back online, the code lives on Codeberg, and the comments are a vibe: part museum tour, part roast, part group therapy for traumatized bloggers. Internet history, resurrected—with drama
Key Points
- •The author created blog posts using Microsoft’s Windows Live Writer, which stored content in proprietary .wpost files.
- •The author used Cursor to generate a Python script that converted .wpost files to Markdown, successfully extracting text on the first attempt.
- •Further script enhancements recovered embedded images from the .wpost files.
- •Recovered posts and images have been restored online.
- •The author released the wlw-extractor Python source code on Codeberg for public use.