Thats excellent thanks.
Something to indicate when an old post is getting a lot of discussion would also be good (like reddit's 'hot'). As an old post with 100 replies today is listed below a more recent post with very little attention.
The method of guessing URLs works pretty well. I'm not quite sure how http://lesswrong.com/r/all/hot/ works, but it might be what you want.
Huh, it never occurred to me it might be hidden in the site already. Thanks!
Having it more prominently advertised might focus discussion on the more interesting posts, though possibly at teh cost of posts remaining ignored if they're not initially picked up on.
By the way, the Recent Comments sidebar (at least in Discussion) is lagging 5-10 entries, maybe more. Don't know if this bug has already been mentioned.
EDIT: Oh, sorry, looks like it's just Firefox. When I opened new pages the sidebar didn't update, but it did upon refreshing.
You can use this Python script I wrote. (Tested on Python 2.7.) It outputs to a CSV which can be imported into Excel, OpenOffice, etc. and put into a xls if you really want. Read the code comments to see where you have to paste in the recent post text and where you have to set the output filename.
Thank you. But I'd rather have the original file, from which the (sub)pages have been generated. The reverse engineering is the second best way.
This link
http://lesswrong.com/r/all/recentposts
gives a page which lists all the recent posts in both the Main and Discussion sections. I've posted it in the comments section before, but I decided to put it in a discussion post because it's a really handy way of accessing the site. I found it by guessing the URL.