Recovering Windows Live Writer Files

Over a decade ago, I used a program made by Microsoft called Windows Live Writer for a couple years to write blog posts before uploading them to whatever blog platform I was using at the time.

That program used a proprietary file format. The blog platforms are lost to me now, an unfortunate casuality of my earlier habit of creating (and sunsetting) new websites all the time. Also, Windows Live Writer (and its sort-of successor Open Live Writer) are long since defunct. So while I still had the old .wpost files, I had no way to extract their contents. Until now.

I'm not good at reverse engineering. It's not a skill I ever developed. 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.

Well, that was a good start, but the size of the .wpost files seemed to suggest they contained more than just text. So I had Cursor dig further and try to retrieve any image files that might be in there, and lo and behold, it found them!

So posts and images that didn't exist on the Internet anymore are now back online, thanks to Cursor and a bit of human curiosity. I've put the wlw-extractor Python source code on Codeberg for others to use.

Here's a list of all the blog posts I recovered through this process.

• The First Habit: Using Cash Only
• Time to lose the cards…
• Tripping up.
• WGR v1.0.3
• Sherman Tanks for Nanocon
• Coming in April–WGR 2!
• A Craftsman’s Magic
• Once, in a forest beyond time…
• Two Systems, One Game
• Eiridia, My Fantasy Setting
• New RPG in the works!
• Quick update on Eiridia
• SWTOR First Impressions: The Sith Sorcerer
• Soviet Faction for DUST: Tactics
• Vox Draconis
• Live action role-playing. Why? Why not?
• Thoughts on Board Games