The adventure of blog migration to WordPress
I started the transition from Nucleus CMS to WordPress early last week…of course thinking this would be an easy migration.  Ummm, no.  It was pretty painful actually.  You see, WordPress doesn’t have a official migration path from Nucleus CMS.  So I had to rely on the advice of others in the WordPress community that had done the same upgrade in the past.  Of course there were a bunch of different ways to do this so I basically took a few of the migration scripts that a few others have written, hacked them up even more and tested.  Testing took about a week…it really sucked.  I had to install version 2.1 of WordPress to use a certain migration script that I didn’t feel like recoding to get to work with 2.8.1.  Of course my categories and images were FUBAR so there was another script I had to write to fix that.  BUT, the biggest issue was how Nucleus handles URL’s for blog posts.  The problem was that I had lots of links out there in Google and other places pointing to blog posts.  In Nucleus my post links were like this:

http://spylogic.net/item/438

WordPress links are something like this:

http://spylogic.net/2009/07/password-length-and-complexity-for-social-media-sites/

So your probably thinking that I can just make my links in WordPress match the Nucleus links?  Nope.  WordPress renumbered all my posts out of order and writing another script to re-number 400+ posts wasn’t in my plan.  So…mod_rewrite and php scripting to the rescue!  I must say, I haven’t had a situation yet where I had to manipulate URL’s on a website yet but now that I did…mod_rewrite is awesome and it was a great learning experience.  I won’t go into gory detail but in a nutshell I used a SQL query to map my old numbered posts from the nucleus posts table to the WordPress style URL naming…by date so they match up.  I then took that query output and put it into a php script.  The php script is referenced in my .htaccess file that contains the RewriteRules.  So…when someone clicks on the old style Nucleus links the script maps it to the new links.  Cool.  If you want to see all of the code I followed the guide that another blogger posted about his migration but made my own modifications and did a few things different then his code did…but you should get the general idea.

What changes?
So besides the blogging platform other things I decided to do was a new logo/header that @JaneDeLay created for me (she rocks!) and I decided to include more of my other publications, articles and such in separate pages.  I also put a speaking page where you can find out where I’m speaking at and also a list of past talks (something a few of you have wanted to know).  RSS feeds are still through FeedBurner so you don’t have to update your feeds.  Lastly, I decided to move the majority of my social media security research to another site altogether.  This site is focused on social media security and will have guides, videos, presentations and research from not only myself but others.  I’m planning on launching the site at DEFCON 17 at my talk or right before it.  It’s been difficult blogging about anything lately because of my crazy work/home/life schedule so hopefully the new site will bring some focus back into blogging and about other things besides social media. I’ll probably mention some of the content from the new site on this blog if it seems relevant.

Anyway, let me know if you have any feedback on the new site (there might be a few bugs still) and thanks for reading my blog!

October 11th Ohio LinuxFest
Security Justice will be podcasting live from the Ohio LinuxFest! Dave and myself will be there hanging out with the folks from Notacon and others. If you are there…stop by, say hi and pick up some Security Justice stickers!

October 15th NEO InfoSec Forum
I will be giving a talk on “Information Gathering with Maltego” at the NEO InfoSec Forum. Join us after the meeting at Mavis Winkles for beer and the live recording of the Security Justice podcast.

October 30-31st Ohio Information Security Summit
There are several things that I am doing at this year’s local security summit:

I will be participating in a panel discussion at 2:20pm on October 30th, “Social Networks – Acceptance and Mitigation of Risk in Today’s Workplace”. Later that evening at 6pm I am leading a birds of a feather session entitled “Security & Privacy of Social Networks”. At this session I will be releasing my Facebook Privacy and Security Guide at the session. Look for a blog post about this project soon.

Finally, on October 31st I will be doing a talk entitled “Penetration Testing 2.0: Corporate Tiger Team” at 1:30pm.

If you are local or in the surrounding Ohio area be sure to check out the Information Security Summit. It’s well organized and is only $250 for two full days of talks!

Oh, and if that wasn’t keeping me busy enough…I am working on another Security Justice special edition with another very special guest to take place some time in October. More details soon.

I’ll hopefully get a few posts up in the next few days…I have a few in the “queue” almost ready to launch. Back to work for me and thanks for reading!

It’s actually quite addicting as others have pointed out and I have started to convert my friends and associates over to the “dark side” of instant social networking. I have never been a big fan of the other social networking sites (Myspace, Facebook) but this is very different. So if you want to check me out on Twitter, here is my profile. Check out some of the security “Twits” I follow like matthewneely, McGrewSecurity, PaulDotCom, haxorthematrix and Andy Willingham.

Here is a newbie guide to Twitter if you need some assistance setting it up and learning to send “tweets”. Enjoy!

Another blogger from the Netherlands named Quzart will be posting an article on the revised c 99shell php script. Keep an eye out for it. Thanks Quzart!