3 Important Things For Noobs On Steemit (That most likely nobody tells you about)

Hey Steemtribe,
even though this post is mostly aimed at making life a bit easier for Steemit newbies, I'm sure there are also some more seasoned users that can use the following info.

So, you just signed up to Steemit, finished your basic account setup and start exploring. You follow a few people, resteem a post or two and write your first post yourself. After a few hours you wonder if someone actually followed back or even esteemed your post. You instinctively start looking for your notification tab that you are used to from other social media platforms but no matter how hard you look you don't find them. Maybe you even ask yourself if you made a mistake by signing up in the first place. But trust me, you didn't. Yes, Steemit might be overwhelming in the beginning and lacking a few features (for now) that we are used to from the dark overlords of Facebook, etc., but it's the better choice because it's way less abusive.

Nevertheless it can be annoying to look at your followers, which might be well over a hundred already thanks to dozens of spam accounts, just to find out that all the listed usernames are in alphabetical order. No indication of your most recent followers to follow them back. Grrrr. And no way at all to see of someone esteemed your posts at all. Double grrrr. But there's help.

So let's dig into what you can do to get around these obstacles, and it's as easy as bookmarking one or two URLs, depending on what works best for you.

Method 1) This is the easiest solution, unless there's something I'm not aware of, and all you have to do is go to your blog page and swap the 'it' of steemit in the URL with 'db', so instead of steemit it will read steemdb.

This will get you to a screen looking like that, and you will find a lot of other insight and stats of your Steemit account.

When you click on the social tab you see that it will show your most recent followers in chronological order. Steemdb should suffice most users and the only reason I show you another solution is that steemdb sometimes times out with an error message when I click on the followers tab.

Method 2) Follow this link: https://steem.makerwannabe.com

You will be taken to the screen below and after entering your username you will be able to see who followed you within the specified time period. Furthermore you have the option to see your post's resteems.

While all of the above features are important for us in terms of popularity, section two of this post talks about the very important issue of your blog's security. When people sign up for a Steemit account they will be advised to diligently protect their master password, also referred to as Master Key or owner's key. Because through the nature of a website running on blockchain site owners do not store their users passwords, which makes the whole system less vulnerable to be hacked and identities being stolen. This in turn puts more responsibility on the users to keep their credentials safe, and it's being stressed out a lot for bloggers to store their Master Key offline, and preferably even non digital. If you lose you Master Key your account is toast and whoever retrieves it can assume your identity as a Steemit user.

While the Master Key's importance receives a lot of emphasis, it is not really made clear enough that there are other keys you can use to operate on the Steemit platform. There are also the Posting Key and the Active Key. For them to be changed you need the Master Key but other than that you will be fine with the Active and Posting Keys to run your Steemit blog. You can use the Active Key to log into your account which means less exposure of your Master Key.

In order to retrieve your Active and Posting Keys you click on your wallet tab on the right side of the screen. As shown below the wallet links you to a page with a sub menu which shows a permissions tab.

Clicking the permissions tab will reveal another page that shows you all your different keys.

Clicking on the tabs to the right of the keys will bring you to the real thing, which you then should copy and use for your everyday tasks on Steemit. If you've been logging into your account with your Master Key I suggest you log out and sign in again with your posting key in order to keep your Master Key offline as much as possible.

Hope that was helpful, and if so, please don't forget upvote and resteem.

Thanks for reading and happy and safe blogging.