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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