This weekend I decided I wanted a more automated way to publish my ‘Interesting Information Security Bits’ posts. To do that I decided I needed two things 1) a workflow process and 2) some tools to do the dirty work for me. So that is what I set out to setup. The rest of this post gives details of the work flow and the script that I came up with to create the posts.
Workflow
I decided to use Delicious to collect the things that I want to appear in the posts. They were going to end up there anyway and an API exists to get at them in an automated fashion. In order to be able to selectively get just the posts I wanted for a given day, I had to come up with a tagging scheme that would differentiate these bookmarks from any others I might save. I did this by tagging them by date, in YYYYMMDD format, and with ‘iisb.’ For this first iteration of the script, I am only using the date portion. The iisb tag will be used later as I expand this effort. So my workflow goes like this:
- Find interesting things (web, twitter, RSS,etc.)
- Bookmark them on Delicious.
- Run script once a day.
- Profit (not really)
A couple notes about how I bookmark things on Delicious. I use the Firefox add-in for this. It makes it so much easier. When I bookmark something, I make sure to enter a description. This becomes the text explaining why I think that particular item is interesting. Finally, I also tag the item with other tags. These tags are for my personal use and also will be used in future expansions of the script.
Script
So, now I have a bunch of things that I believe are interesting that I want to tell all of you about. Instead of having to spend a lot of time with a blog post editor, I simply login to my linux machine and execute
./dailypost.pl
Tada, magical blog post.
This script is written in perl because that’s the language I can churn things out quickly in at this time. It uses several CPAN modules, but the most important ones are Net::Delicious and WordPress::XMLRPC. Why reinvent the wheel. Eventually, the posting part will be automatic using cron, but I still have some things I want to do before I turn it loose.
For those interested in the guts of the script, here it is. It consists of the dailypost.pl perl script and a config file. Obviously, replace my comments below with your info if you want to try it. I currently have it set to create the posts as drafts and I then go and publish them manually. Again, this is because this is a pretty young process.
Config file (must be named dailypost.cfg and in the same directory as the script at this time)
[delicious]
user="username"
pswd="delicious password"
count=100
[wordpress]
prefix="What you want the opening to be."
postfix="What you want the ending to be."
category="Wordpress category"
title="post title prefix. The date will be appended"
publish=0
username="username"
password="wordpress password"
xmlrpcurl="http://<your site>/xmlrpc.php"
Script. (I apologize for the complete lack of comments. Quick and dirty was what I was after.)
#!/usr/bin/perl -CS
use Net::Delicious;
use WordPress::XMLRPC;
use Config::Simple;
use Log::Dispatch::Screen;
use Text::Unidecode;
use Date::Format;
my $config = new Config::Simple('dailypost.cfg');
my $description = '';
my $body = '';
my $postDate = time2str("%Y%m%d", time);
my $del = Net::Delicious->new($config);
my $o = WordPress::XMLRPC->new({
username => $config->param("wordpress.username"),
password => $config->param("wordpress.password"),
proxy => $config->param("wordpress.xmlrpcurl"),
blog_id => $config->param("wordpress.blog_id")
});
foreach my $p ($del->recent_posts({tag => "$postDate",
count => $config->param("delicious.count")})) {
$body .= "<li><a target='_blank' href='" . $p->href() .
"'>" . unidecode($p->description) . "</a>\n" .
unidecode($p->extended()) . "</li>\n";
}
$description = $config->param("wordpress.prefix") .
$body .
$config->param("wordpress.postfix");
$post->{categories} = [$config->param("wordpress.category")];
$post->{title} = $config->param("wordpress.title") .
time2str("%m/%d/%Y",time);
$post->{description} = $description;
$page_num = $o->newPost($post,$config->param("wordpress.publish"));
print $description . "\n";
print "page num = ", $page_num, "\n";
That’s basically it. I’m happy to have discussion about this with anyone who has questions and feel free to take and use anything you want. I am also happy to email the config file and script to anyone who wants it. Just drop me a note a kriggins _at_ infosecramblings.com.
Kevin
Posted by Kevin Riggins 
