During the week leading up to the conference, and during the month following, Nothing Wavering customarily includes an additional section on the front page of the portal containing just the aggregated audio and video from the official podcasts of the conference as they become available.  In past years the audio has often become available a short time after each session, and the video is usually posted sometime during the following week.

As they become available, links to mp3 audio and mp4 video of individual discourses will be automatically published on twitter under the #ldsconf hashtag.  Last conference this functionality of Nothing Wavering relied on a third part web service that did not work so well.  As a result, Nothing Wavering now features its own twitter integration that has been thoroughly tested during the last 6 months and should post every mp3 and video within 30 minutes of becoming available.

You can subscribe to the aggregated General Conference RSS feed here, and you can follow the General Conference podcast on twitter here.

For the first time this conference, links to audio and video of the conference will be posted through the new Nothing Wavering Facebook Page.  Become a fan of Nothing Wavering to see links to individual talks right in your Facebook News Feed and you will be able to easily share them with friends and family.

You can also watch General Conference live streaming on the internet through the church’s official website, and at byu.tv.

We’ve made some excellent progress during the last year.  Since the launch I’ve added a blog, improved the SEO, added twitter feeds, written a custom twitter integration, created a google gadget, and laid the ground work for a Nothing Wavering Podcast.

I’ve received a lot of positive feedback and the site has been able to help increase the visits and readers to the blogs we’ve included.

In the first year, NothingWavering.org has had 52,739 visits, 95,191 page views by 41,924 unique visitors.  Contrary to the trends on many other blogs and websites, the number of visitors tends to peak on the weekends, especially on Sunday when members of the church are searching the web for LDS related content.  We’ve aggregated 12341 posts, articles, and media.  Between the 4 twitter accounts we’ve posted over 4000 links on twitter.

Our LDS Blogs twitter account shows up in the first 10 Google results when searching for “lds blogs” and 5 of the top 10 pages in the results discuss NothingWavering.org and/or link directly to it.  NothingWavering.org itself shows up on the second page of Google results.  Hopefully we will continue to gain search engine prominence.

During the coming year I hope to continue to promote mainstream and orthodox Mormon content with new features.  Some of the ideas I’m considering include:

• iPhone, Blackberry, and Android friendly webpages, and maybe even native applications.
• The Podcast will hopefully launch with interviews with nothing wavering bloggers and other LDS personalities.
• I’m also looking at possibly creating a video aggregation page.
• A page for trending LDS specific topics on twitter.
• I still hope to start an LDS Blog Carnival
• I hope to introduce a way for readers to indicate which articles they like and have a page displaying the most popular posts for the day, week, month, and year.

A big thank you to everyone who has contributed to and supported this effort.  Do you have ideas for what you would like to see on Nothing Wavering?  Let me know in the comments below.

The Twitter outreach has been pretty successful.  As of the moment, LDS Blogs have 370 twitter followers, LDS Official has 452 twitter followers, and LDS Bloggers and General Conference have 173 and 212 followers.  That means that new posts by Nothing Wavering bloggers are being seen by hundreds of people who are interested in keeping up with LDS topics.

And new followers are continuing to join every day.

Our initial twitter integration used a popular 3rd party service called Twitterfeed.  Twitterfeed checked the aggregated RSS feeds from Nothing Wavering at regular intervals, and then posted links to any new content to twitter.

Over the last few months, however, some deficiencies with using twitterfeed became apparent.  It would often take an unusual amount of time for twitterfeed to post new content, especially from the LDS official content.  It also restricted the maximum number of new items to five for every iteration.  Some links failed to ever be posted.

Then, for LDS General Conference, twitterfeed failed to post almost all of the podcast links from the conference.

Twitterfeed also posed some security concerns because it required the Nothing Wavering usernames and passwords to post to twitter.

While twitterfeed has helped get us to where we are, Nothing Wavering needed to be directly integrated with twitter, without relying on a 3rd party system.

Last night I created a Nothing Wavering Twitter Integration application.  It uses Twitter’s new oAuth protocol so that the usernames and passwords do not have to be passed through the internet unencrypted.

The application integrates directly into the Nothing Wavering process that identifies and posts new content, so blog posts will appear on Twitter within a couple of minutes after being picked up from the RSS feeds.

Writing my own integration also allowed greater control over how the links are posted.  The twitter hashtags now appear after the blog name, title, and link to make posts easier to read and identify.  Blog names are also compressed by removing spaces to allow more of the post title to be displayed within Twitter’s 140 character limit.  And we are now using tr.im.com to automatically shorten the URLs if needed.

An additional advantage of the new integration is that all aggregated Nothing Wavering posts on Twitter now identify themselves as having been posted by NothingWavering.org with a link back to the website.  This will help drive more readership back to the portal and hopefully attract more readers.

As with all new features, I am already aware of one slight bug, but it has been running all day since 5:00 this morning, and I have been very pleased with the results.

Let me know if you have any problems with it.  And if you would like your blog added to the portal, please use the contact page to submit an application.

Of course, the process of blog selection will always be subjective to some degree.  However, in the interest of being transparent and open with Nothing Wavering readers, as well as setting expectations for those who apply to have their blogs included, I am posting the following explanation of the guidelines I employ when selecting blogs to include on the portal.

Blog Selection Guidelines

Nothing Wavering desires to promote high-quality, interesting content by mainstream, orthodox LDS Bloggers.  President Boyd K. Packer of the Twelve Apostles of the Church once used a memorable analogy of hiring coach drivers in a discourse about The Word of Wisdom.  Applying his analogy to blogging, we want to feature blogs that steer far from the cliff’s edge rather than try to see how close they can come without crossing the line.

Obviously, the number of Mormon Bloggers is increasing every day and we cannot include everyone.  Exclusion from Nothing Wavering does not necessarily mean that a blog does not contain worthwhile content or that it is not faithful by official standards.

There is an intangible aspect to evaluation, and we pray that the Holy Spirit will guide us that we may discern those blogs and bloggers that we should promote and that we may have the gift of Charity while making decisions. We use the following guidelines to help us in our selection process.

1. Blogs should not include open criticism of or opposition to the authorities of the Church by any of the regular or guest contributors or by a significant number of commentators.  Complaining and murmuring about the church in blog posts or comments should be strongly discouraged.  We want bloggers and commentators of whom there is little doubt that they actively support the Brethren and the Church.

2. Blogs that discuss complicated topics are welcome, but the tone in which such topics are discussed should be decidedly orthodox.  The use of inflammatory or ambiguous language to stir up controversy and debate, to satisfy intellectual gratification, to challenge or question church doctrine or policy, to promote the sensational, or to emphasize supposed weaknesses and mistakes by the church or its leaders are not welcome.

3. Blogs that recommend blogs or other websites by disaffected LDS members or ex-Mormons are not welcome, regardless of their own content.

4. Blog content should be more than just personal testimony or stream of consciousness.  Blogs that consist predominantly of personal trivia, family photos, or content that only those who already know the blogger would care to read should seek promotion on social networking websites where such content is more applicable.

5. Blog content should not contain excessive in-group references, inside jokes, obscure slang, or unexplained acronyms that will be unintelligible to new visitors. You shouldn’t have to be a part of an “in crowd” to make sense of the content.

6. LDS blog content should be mostly about LDS topics or from an clear LDS perspective.

7. Blogs on non-LDS topics by LDS bloggers should mostly consist of thoughtful and edifying content.

8. Within reason, blog posts should strive to be well formed, grammatically correct, and formatted to be easy to read.

9. Swear words and profanity, even words that are often considered mild, should be avoided as should internet short-hand acronyms that stand for profanity.  Likewise a light-minded attitude toward sexual content, including sexual references and jokes is not acceptable.  Sarcasm and other language intended to belittle should also be discouraged.

10. Blogs should not contain excessive advertising and the blog layout should be relatively clean and easy to navigate.

11. Blogs whose primary purpose is the commercial promotion of a certain product, company, or service will not be included.  For instance, if the blog is the effort of an author or agent to market a specific book or series of books, it will not likely be included in the portal.

12. Many blogs are too new to evaluate effectively. Blogs less than 60 days old or with fewer than 15 posts should be placed in a waiting queue until they are old enough and have enough content to be properly evaluated.  Blogs that have more than 30 posts, however, may be evaluated even if they have not reached the 60 day limit.

Please feel free to give your feedback on these guidelines in the comments.

As they become available, links to mp3 audio and mp4 video of individual discourses will be automatically published on twitter under the #ldsconf hashtag.

You can subscribe to the aggregated General Conference RSS feed here, and you can follow the General Conference podcast on twitter here.

The General Conference of the church is a great opportunity to be inspired and uplifted by the words of living apostles and prophets of Jesus Christ.  And with indiviual sermons by each speaker available on demand as both audio and video, their words have never been more available and convenient.

You can also watch General Conference live streaming on the internet through the church’s official website, and at byu.tv.  The following live sources will be available Saturday, April 4th  and Sunday April 5th, 2009:

Streaming Video General Conference in English

Streaming Video General Conference in Spanish

Streaming Video General Conference in Portugues

Streaming Video General Conference in American Sign Language

In the future, if Nothing Wavering goes down, you can check my twitter account for updates about what is happening.

While every hosting provider has occasional outages, this is the first time I have been down for such a long time.  Hopefully things will remain stable now.

Nothing Wavering welcomes the following new blogs to our portal:

LDS Blogs

Modern Mormon Dad
Mormonopia
mormonsandscience

LDS Bloggers

I’d Rather Be Writing

Take some time to check them out, read some of their recent posts, and coment on their blogs.  New posts from these blogs are immediately available through the portal, and will also show up in the Nothing Wavering Google Gadget, RSS Feeds, and Twitter feeds.

Try out the new Nothing Wavering Google Gadget.

Once it has been added to your iGoogle page, you can drag and drop it to whatever place best suits you.

By default, the gadget has tabs for LDS Blogs, Bloggers, and Official LDS Content.  Any of these tabs can be hidden using the gadget settings. The settings also  allow you to add an additional General Conference tab with links to audio and video from the most recent conference, and you can customize the number of titles that appear under the tabs.

Even if you don’t use iGoogle, Google Gadgets can be added to any webpage, so if you would like to display the Nothing Wavering gadget in the sidebar of your blog or website.  You can customize the width, height, color, tabs to display, and number of titles using a simple editor that allows you to copy and paste a snippet of JavaScript code into you page.

Go here to get the Nothing Wavering Gadget for your own page.

Here is a live, working example embedded right into this post:

A number of people are already using iGoogle and Google Reader to follow the Nothing Wavering RSS Feeds. Because of the way Google prioritizes feeds, sometimes new content doesn’t show up until hours after it has been posted. The gadget has an advantage over viewing the feeds on Google because it contacts nothingwavering.org directly and uses a custom, light-weight xml format that is only cached by Google for 15 minutes. So if you want to keep up with new content in a more timely fashion, the gadget should be a big improvement. And for the iGoogle page, it is easier to manage all of Nothing Wavering’s content in a single, tabbed gadget than to have multiple gadgets for each RSS feed.

Though I am not aware of any, there might be a bug or two that I did not catch, so please be patient and report any problems here.

In the future, I will also be adding support for Google Desktop, so that the gadget can be displayed right on your Desktop.

Please try it out, add it to your iGoogle page and your your website, and share it with your friends to help promote good LDS content on the web!

Every post in an RSS feed includes a Globally Unique Identifier or GUID that can be used to uniquely identify that post from all others. GUIDs are important because posts titles, post URLs, and post dates often change as people update their posts to correct misspellings, correct ambiguous text, or add updates. Even while all of these other values change, the GUID stays the same, and so when a program like Nothing Wavering or Google Reader reads the feed, it knows to simply update the existing post wit the same GUID instead of creating an all new duplicate post. So if you change the title of your post, Nothing Wavering should simply update the old post instead of creating a duplicate with a different title.

When I first programmed the RSS Feeds for Nothing Wavering, I used the the URL of the originating post as the GUID. Though I didn’t realize it at first, this caused a number of problems.

First, some of the blogs I was aggregating also used the post URL as the GUID. Since the GUID is supposed to be globally unique, I was creating a separate RSS Feed with a duplicate GUID. Not a good idea.

The second problem was that some of the feeds from the church, specifically some of the Gems feeds, used the same URL for all of the posts in one month. So because I was using the URL as the GUID, I ended up with duplicate GUIDs in the same feed, which caused the feed to become invalid.

The duplicate GUID problem caused errors for some feed readers, because they would either reject the feed as invalid, or they would think the different posts with the same GUID were the same post. It was also causing inconsistent resyndication to Twitter.

So yesterday I attempted to fix the GUID problem. Instead of using the post URL, I first switched it to use the nothingWavering.org URL with some unique post identifiers. But shortly after releasing the change I realized that it was causing the RSS Feed to link to Nothing Wavering instead of the originating post and the unique identifiers were showing users a 404 page not found error.

So, following Google’s suggestion, I changed the GUID again to use the Tag URI specification for creating GUIDs.

But then I forgot to change the GUID attribute to indicate that the GUID isn’t the permalink, and so the feed failed to validate because it expected the GUID to be  URL.  So I changed the GUID attribute to indicate that the GUID was simply an identifier and not a permalink  URL, and that did the trick.

Unfortunately, all this playing around with the GUIDs caused many of the feeds, as well as Twitter, to display duplicate posts because the GUIDs were different so it thought they were new posts.

So I apologize to any of you who felt spammed, either in your feed reader, or on twitter.  Using the Tag URI specification for GUIDs should prevent the same thing from happening again in the future.

If you have had any other problems wit hthe RSS feeds or Twitter please feel free to let me know here in the comments.

Nothing Wavering also has a widget of recent posts from Blogs and the Church that can be embedded into your sidebar.  Click on the Embed [HTML] icon on the front page to get the code.  The number of post titles that appear, as well as the height and width of the widget can also be customized.

Here are the banners:

170 x 21

<a title="NothingWavering.org : Mainstream and Orthodox LDS Blogs and Bloggers" href="http://www.nothingwavering.org"><img style="border: none;" src="http://www.nothingwavering.org/nothingwavering170x21.jpg" alt="Nothing Wavering" /></a>

160 x 20

<a title="NothingWavering.org : Mainstream and Orthodox LDS Blogs and Bloggers" href="http://www.nothingwavering.org"><img style="border: none;" src="http://www.nothingwavering.org/nothingwavering160x20.jpg" alt="Nothing Wavering" /></a>

150 x 19

<a title="NothingWavering.org : Mainstream and Orthodox LDS Blogs and Bloggers" href="http://www.nothingwavering.org"><img style="border: none;" src="http://www.nothingwavering.org/nothingwavering150x19.jpg" alt="Nothing Wavering" /></a>

140 x 17

<a title="NothingWavering.org : Mainstream and Orthodox LDS Blogs and Bloggers" href="http://www.nothingwavering.org"><img style="border: none;" src="http://www.nothingwavering.org/nothingwavering140x17.jpg" alt="Nothing Wavering" /></a>

130 x 16

<a title="NothingWavering.org : Mainstream and Orthodox LDS Blogs and Bloggers" href="http://www.nothingwavering.org"><img style="border: none;" src="http://www.nothingwavering.org/nothingwavering130x16.jpg" alt="Nothing Wavering" /></a>

120 x 15

<a title="NothingWavering.org : Mainstream and Orthodox LDS Blogs and Bloggers" href="http://www.nothingwavering.org"><img style="border: none;" src="http://www.nothingwavering.org/nothingwavering120x15.jpg" alt="Nothing Wavering" /></a>

Plain Text Links

Nothing Wavering
<a title="NothingWavering.org : Mainstream and Orthodox LDS Blogs and Bloggers" href="http://www.nothingwavering.org">Nothing Wavering</a>

NothingWavering.org
<a title="NothingWavering.org : Mainstream and Orthodox LDS Blogs and Bloggers" href="http://www.nothingwavering.org">NothingWavering.org</a>

www.NothingWavering.org
<a title="NothingWavering.org : Mainstream and Orthodox LDS Blogs and Bloggers" href="http://www.nothingwavering.org">www.NothingWavering.org</a>