Attach to Process

In my last DevLog, I mentioned that I took down apps.dinobansigan.com, and with it, the Write.as Archive Page Generator. I said I was letting it go. Well, that lasted about two months.

So, I went to update one of my other blogs recently, and realized the archive page on it was way out of date. The tool I used to update it was gone. Turns out I still needed it after all.

Why it can't just be a website

The old version was a Blazor WASM app. Since it ran in the browser, it couldn't call the Write.as API directly because of CORS. My workaround was to write my own API for the Blazor app to call, running as an Azure App Service. That API ran on free Azure credits that I've since lost access to.

I didn't want to host something again, since that means paying for it. And I didn't want to fight CORS again either. So this time around, the answer was an app that runs locally on my own machine. CORS only applies to browsers, so a regular app can call the Write.as API just fine.

Rebuilding it with Claude Code

I rebuilt this one with Claude Code. I treated it like pairing with another developer. Claude wrote most of the code, and I reviewed every change before it went in. Good news was, I still had the source code for both the old Blazor app and the API on my machine, so we had something to work off of. We ended up with a simple .NET console app. You run it with your blog's alias, and it spits out the HTML for your archive page. Same output as before, same CSS classes, so if you customized the look of your archive page, it should still work.

It still uses my WriteAs.NET library to talk to the Write.as API. But we swapped out CommonMark.NET and HtmlAgilityPack for Markdig, which turns the Markdown of untitled posts into plain text in a single line of code. CommonMark.NET hasn't been updated in years, so it was time anyway. Going through my old code also turned up a few bugs, like the app crashing on short untitled posts. Oops.

From reading through the old code to having a working app up on GitHub, the whole thing took one afternoon.

Rate limiting

The biggest surprise was that Write.as now heavily rate limits calls to its API. And because of how I wrote WriteAs.NET, a rate limited call just comes back empty instead of throwing an error. So the first test run fetched 20 out of 55 posts, and would have happily given me an incomplete archive page without me knowing.

The fix was to slow things down. The app now waits 10 seconds between each page of posts, retries if it still gets rate limited, and checks the number of posts it got against what the blog says it has. It's slow, but it gets all of them. Funny enough, that's an improvement over the old version, which used to time out on blogs with a lot of posts. An API key would probably help with the rate limiting, but I don't have one set up right now.

There was also a bug in the new version where some emojis in post titles showed up as code instead of the actual emoji. That one got fixed real quick.

It's on GitHub

Back in 2022, I said I'd share the source code for the WPF version of this tool if there was enough interest. This time around, I'm just putting it out there: writeas-archive-generator. It's a console app, so no pretty UI, but it does the job. You'll need the .NET 10 SDK to run it, and the README has all the details.

Eventually, I want to build a Windows desktop app with a UI for it. But for now, this works, and my archive page is up to date again. Thanks for reading, and I'll catch you in the next DevLog.

Tags: #DevLog #ClaudeCode #DotNet #CSharp #WriteAs #WriteAsNet

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