So, I went to update one of my other blogs recently, and realized the archive page on it was way out of date.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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This very minor update adds an interface for the WriteAsClient class, which opens it up for use with dependency injection in ASP.NET Core. This allows you to create a single WriteAsClient instance and re-use it when needed, making the caching additions from Version 1.2.0 much more useful.

This also frees me up to make better use of it in the API I'm working on.

You can install it via nuget: Install-Package WriteAs.NET -Version 1.2.1

Or via the .NET Core command line interface: dotnet add package WriteAs.NET --version 1.2.1

If you find any bugs or issues with it, please let me know. Thanks and y'all have a good night.

Tags: #DotNet #WriteAs #WriteAsNet

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This latest version now allows you to enter an API key when initializing a WriteAsClient instance. This API key will allow you to bypass the rate limiting checks on the Write.as API.

Some basic in-memory caching has also been added to the client. You can configure some of the cache settings when initializing a WriteAsClient instance. The new settings are described below:

• cacheExpirationInSeconds determines how long data will stay in the cache before it expires. The default value for this setting is 300 seconds.
• cacheSize determines how many objects it can store in the cache. Note that a collection of posts (List<Post>) and a single post each count as 1 item. The default value for this setting is 4.

You can install it via nuget: Install-Package WriteAs.NET -Version 1.2.0

Or via the .NET Core command line interface: dotnet add package WriteAs.NET --version 1.2.0

If you find any bugs or issues with it, please let me know. Thanks and y'all have a good weekend.

Tags: #DotNet #WriteAs #WriteAsNet

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The two issues that I ran into were: figuring out what the cache key was going to be for the cached object and removing the oldest object in the cache. I now have solutions for those issues.

For the cache keys, I figured I could use the method name plus the parameter values.

For clearing out the oldest cached object, I decided to make use of a generic Queue collection that could accept the cache key values. Then I could just pop-off the oldest value from the Queue and use that to remove the associated object in the cache.

And so anyway, I should have the updated version of the client/wrapper library out soon. I just need to do some more testing on it.

Tags: #DotNet #WriteAs #WriteAsNet

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But, as Matt mentioned here, a solution is in place through the use of Application keys.

I've already updated the WriteAs.Net client to make use of Application keys. But before I release the latest version, I also want to give it some caching abilities. That's what I'm working on and testing right now in my spare time. Once that's done, I'll publish the latest version of the WriteAs.Net client to Nuget.

After that, I plan to get the WriteFreely Archive Page Generator working once again. Then I'll work on getting the Search app for my journal working as well.

Tags: #Blazor #WriteAs #WriteAsNet

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