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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.

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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.

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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.