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.

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.