Press4Steem Dev Blog (in association with Pennsif)

in #development2 years ago (edited)

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We (@freelance.monkey and @rexthetech) are really enjoying working with @pennsif.witness on our Press4Steem WordPress plugin.

Development is going really well, and we expect to publicly release the plugin in coming days!

Changes

There's not much visually different to our first presentation. Most changes have been on the coding side:

  • Got rid of mixed jQuery/native JS code
  • Fixed namespace issues for maximum compatibility with other WordPress plugins
  • Added an AJAX spinner while Press4Steem is communicating with the Steem API node
  • Added extensive error handling
  • Posts now create much prettier permlinks, for better SEO

To-Do List

  • Support editing of posts. When a post has already been posted to the Steem blockchain, but then edited in WordPress, we want the plugin to offer to edit the post on Steem to match. It turns out that the Steem blockchain supports content patching to edit posts; we don't need to resubmit the entire body of the post onto the blockchain, instead we can send an efficient list of changes.

We have other features planned, but the only feature we consider essential for launch is post editing support, so we'll save those for later!

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Thoughts on Canonicality

@ubongudofot mentioned issues around duplicating content, so I want to briefly mention that. I think similar discussions were probably had when the previous WordPress-to-Steem bridge (SteemPress) was being developed.

Search engines such as Google like there to ideally only be one copy of any given piece of content. They would really like a blog post, for example, to only appear on a single domain, rather than being copied around the place.

In the situation where that is the case, they call that single authoritative source canonical.

Search engines started bothering about this in the first place because there were a lot of clone sites using very simple techniques of ripping off content from other sites to generate traffic through fake SEO.

In fact, they started caring so much that there was even an HTML tag introduced to indicate which copy of a given page was the "master" copy, rel='canonical'.

Now, that's all fine, but the thing is that Google was not built to understand Steem! We have a decentralised social network, where the "master copy" of any piece of content is inside the blockchain itself.

Steemit.com certainly isn't the canonical source of that content; it can be viewed on any alternative Condenser deployment, or any alternative Steem front end.

Google's concept of canonicality doesn't really make sense in this context. For that reason, we're not really worried about the thorny issues that would crop up in practically any other crossposting situation!

However, it's worth mentioning that if desired, the WordPress blog owner can absolutely choose to use the canonical tag on the WordPress side, to indicate to search engines that the WordPress blog is the authoritative source of a post. This should prevent any negative effects from Google's lack of understanding about Steem!

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I find <link rel="canonical" href="https://steemit.com/development/@steemwow/press4steem-dev-blog-in-association-with-pennsif" in the page source for this post. If I'm not mistaken, that may cause ranking problems if the author also sets a canonical link on the WordPress side. (see here for example.)

Not sure if it's still maintained, but at one point, there was a table of canonical applications. As you suggested in your commentary above, SteemPress was included.

"steempress": {
"name": "SteemPress",
"homepage": "https://wordpress.org/plugins/steempress/"
},

That's a very good point, thanks - and for linking that post. Rather cheeky for any front end to assume that authority!

As I recall, they reversed that change pretty quickly. Seems like it's a good idea for new dapps to get registered, though. I also notice that I couldn't find that table in Steemit's github, so it might be a good idea for Steemit to make their own copy... (unless I overlooked it)

Indeed! Thanks for the historical context :)

More and more dapps coming wish to see this app into steemdapp web page
;)

Thank you for really clearifying that.., i was keen about it and now that you have explained, i'll wait for what is available...

Good Job..!

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