So, I am sitting here scratching my head again. I use Windows Live Writer (WLW) to post to my blog. I like it, it rocks. There is a plugin architecture, which is cool, and some other API’s for doing things.
WLW saves drafts and posted posts as .wpost files to a directory in your My Documents. The files are in a proprietary binary format. It is cool though as all your posts are saved and you can open existing ones, edit, and republish easily.
I want to go through my posts and add WordPress tags. Not technorati tags, but WordPress tags, so I can have a cool little tag cloud. WP 2.5 support WLW tags by default, WP 2.3 (which I am running) can get tags from WLW through a little REG hack which I have applied and it works for new posts.
What I want to do, is update all my historical posts through WLW instead of WordPress web interface.
Since I have reformatted, changed computers, started blogging before WLW came about, of course I don’t have all my posts on this machine. So I thought, why not download them from my blog and create .wpost files so I have them?
First I looked for a plugin, no dice, doesn’t even seem that anyone has wanted to do this. I searched forums, blogs, Google, whatever. Found little info.
Next I dug into the API, nothing there that would really help me. What I would do is just access my posts through the XML-RPC interface WordPress has and create new .wpost files in my directory, you wouldn’t think it would be that tough..but it is.
It would be nice if the .wpost file was open and had a documented spec, that way I could do it easy as 1,2,3. Even if there was some API with WLW to create new posts and save them (you can create new posts, but only by programmatically opening WLW).
Well, I guess I will keep my eyes open for anything that comes along that will make this possible, until then, it is using the WP web interface. I suppose I could write an app to just directly edit the post tags through the XML-RPC API, and save them, but I want them on my machine as well. Just another good backup I suppose.
Steve Novoselac's Blog 
4 replies on “Windows Live Writer – API Open (not really) – I Want To Download Existing Posts”
lookin’ good stevie! (the page i mean) 🙂
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You *can* download old posts into Live Writer, I did this for a similar exercise as you to add a load of WP tags, and also to go back to old posts and fix some broken links etc.
If you go to File > Open, or the Open button on the toolbar, or the “More” button in the right hand pane under “Recently Posted” you get the general open dialogue.
Under the options for Drafts and Recently Posted you should have a third option with the name of your blog(s) on it.
Click this and it will download headings and a short extract from your existing posts, most recent first.
It only pulls down a few (I think 20 or 25) by default, but you can easily change this to show more using the dropdown box at the top of the dialogue – I have mine set at 100 and it remembers this for the next session.
This does not depend on .wpost files (good job since I only started using WLW after several months of blogging through the WP browser interface). It also does not generate .wpost files unless and until you download a particular article.
I hope this helps you to go build that tag cloud!
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AdamV is right, you can go back and edit older posts in WLW. You also don’t need the regedit hack to make WLW support tags in WordPress. The latest versions of WordPress will indicate to WLW that it can use tags on your blog.
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Cool, I will try that out – as far as the back posts. On tagging, I wasn’t sure if 2.3.1 handled tags by default. I read something on WordPress blog that said it didn’t, and that 2.5 would.
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