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LDS General Conference October 2009 on NothingWavering.org

by J. Max Wilson (10/02/2009 21:53 pm)

It’s time again for the General Conference of the LDS Church. Taking the opportunity to be inspired and uplifted by the words of living apostles and prophets of Jesus Christ has never been so easy or convenient.

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.

Nothing Wavering 1 Year Anniversary

by J. Max Wilson (07/14/2009 10:41 am)

Today is the one year anniversary of the launch of NothingWavering.org!

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.

Permanent Link | 1 Comment | Filed Under: Updates | Tags: anniversary • features • stats

New Twitter Integration Application for LDS Blogs

by J. Max Wilson (04/24/2009 16:07 pm)

At the beginning of 2009 I announced that, as part of our efforts to promote LDS blogs, links to the blog content aggregated by Nothing Wavering would begin to be automatically posted on Twitter.

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.

Permanent Link | Comments Off | Filed Under: Feature Announcements | Tags: features • integration • social networking • twitter

Blog Selection Guidelines

by J. Max Wilson (04/23/2009 12:00 pm)

One complaint about LDS blog portals is that the criteria for how the administrators choose which blogs to include or exclude are rarely enumerated and as a result their decisions can appear inconsistent or arbitrary.

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.

Permanent Link | 1 Comment | Filed Under: Administrative | Tags: adminstrative • blogs • guidelines • information • selection • transparency

LDS General Conference April 2009 on NothingWavering.org

by J. Max Wilson (03/30/2009 09:02 am)

During the week leading up to this weekend’s General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and during the two weeks following, Nothing Wavering will include 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.

Permanent Link | Comments Off | Filed Under: Uncategorized | Tags: apostles • audio • conference • Geneal Conference • LDS • Mormon • podcast • prophet • video

Nothing Wavering Website Offline During Last Weekend

by J. Max Wilson (03/02/2009 08:14 am)

Over this last weekend, the hosting provider for Nothing Wavering experienced a major hardware outage. While they were able to get most of the websites they host back up within a couple of hours, one segment of their system remained offline for over 40 hours. Unfortunately my websites are hosted on that segment.

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.

Permanent Link | Comments Off | Filed Under: Problems | Tags: bugs • errors • hosting • offline

New Blog Additions

by J. Max Wilson (01/22/2009 14:58 pm)

As promised, I have begun to process the backlog of blog applications and I will be announcing new blogs as they are added.

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.

Permanent Link | 1 Comment | Filed Under: Uncategorized

Try the new Nothing Wavering Google Gadget

by J. Max Wilson (01/14/2009 11:35 am)

Do you use iGoogle? iGoogle is a great way to personalize and organize information that is important to you. You can track your email, your blogs, visitors to your site, keep a task list, play games, watch videos, and all kinds of other things by adding Google Gadgets to your own personalized page.

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:

Permanent Link | 2 Comments | Filed Under: Other Technologies | Tags: embed • gadget • Google Gadget • iGoogle • widget

Duplicate RSS and Twitter Bug Fixes

by J. Max Wilson (01/13/2009 10:09 am)

Some of you may have noticed that the Nothing Wavering RSS feeds had some problems yesterday. For those interested, here is a technical explanation of what happened and what has been fixed. (Those not interested can just skip the rest and know that the problems are fixed.)

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.

Permanent Link | Comments Off | Filed Under: Other Technologies | Tags: bugs • rss • technology • twitter

Additional Sidebar Banners

by J. Max Wilson (01/09/2009 10:21 am)

It is apparent that the single Nothing Wavering banner I created does not work in a number of situations, because it is too wide, or doesn’t line up well with other banners. So here are some addtional sidebar banners for Nothing Wavering. Again, if your blog is included on our portal please consider adding the banner or link to your site. It is not required by any means, but would be a great way of promoting and driving readers toward other Nothing Wavering blogs.

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:

Permanent Link | 2 Comments | Filed Under: Uncategorized

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About

Nothing Wavering aims to build a community of Orthodox and Mainstream LDS Blogs and Bloggers to promote the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Announcements about new features and new blogs added to the portal, as well as queries for user feedback, feature requests, bug reports, and other community interaction will appear here on the Nothing Wavering Blog.

Subscribe: Subscribe to recieve a daily email summary of new Nothing Wavering Blog posts. Email address:

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