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 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.