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.

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.

Nothing Wavering will now allow you to follow new content through twitter.  Twitter provides an additional way to direct traffic to good, mainstream and orthodox LDS content.  New posts on LDS Blogs, by LDS Bloggers, and aggregated on Official Church Feeds, as well as aggregated General Conference audio and video, will now be available through twitter as well as through RSS Feed and Email Subscriptions.

Blogs included on NothingWavering.org can enjoy increased exposure to their content from twitter readers, and hopefully increased readership and influence.

Twitter:

• Follow new LDS Blog Posts
• Follow new Posts by LDS Bloggers on other topics
• Follow aggregated content from all Official LDS Church Feeds
• Follow aggregated Audio and Video feeds from LDS General Conference

Additionally you can follow new content on this blog.

You will also see the twitter icon () in each section of Nothing Wavering.  You can click it to go to the twitter account for that section.

Let me know what you think.

I apologize to those who have applied for inclusion in the portal and have not been added yet.  I will be evaluating the remaining blogs over the next couple of weeks, as well as publishing admission guidelines so that you will know what I am looking for.

Please feel free to leave comments with your questions, comments, or suggestions, as well as any bugs you have found.

In addition to announcing new features, and newly listed blogs, I will also be linking to other blogs here that may not qualify for inclusion in the portal, but are worth your while and looking for additional readers.

Nothing Wavering will be launching some exciting new features for the Orthodox LDS Community, including a Podcast, with cutting edge technology that will allow you to record comments, questions, and podcast topic suggestions over the phone, with the potential for your recording to be included in the next podcast episode.  Feel free to test it out before the first episode.

Finally, a number of people have asked for a banner to place on their blogs to show that they are part of Nothing Wavering.

Here is the image:

You can add it to your blog using the following markup:

If your blog is listed on Nothing Wavering, or if you support the vision of Nothing Wavering and want to help promote it, please consider adding it to your blog.  If you need personal help adding it, I would be happy to give more detailed instructions.

Thanks!  And I look forward to working with you to promote the Church on the web.