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.

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.