SteemPress answers to common questions and update to design
Since last week's announcement post that @steempress-io has received a 1,000,000 SP delegation, we've seen an explosive growth in interest. Whether it be from steemians wondering how they can use SteemPress or be eligible for a @steempress-io upvote, to communities and others looking to make partnerships with us. We are thrilled to see all the people joining our new Discord server and are grateful for all the ways our users take part in reporting their experience with using SteemPress. A huge thanks also to everyone who have made some of the now many tutorial videos and posts and contributed to sharing information about our service and are excited to see how we can continue to grow SteemPress!
In this post, we will try answering some of the most common questions we have received over the last week, as well as presenting and briefly explaining updates we've made to our design.
Update to the SteemPress Logo and Design
As the most enthusiastic of our followers may have noticed, we recently updated our banner as well as making a subtle change to our logo. Again we would like to thank @foundation who's been of tremendous help both in helping us develop the right branding strategy as well as doing all of the visual artwork!
For the banner, we wanted a cleaner version that still communicates the core of our value proposition to new users not familiar with Steem: The ability to reach new audiences through a decentralized blockchain with many active communities and front-ends to gain engagement around one's content.
The design is picked specifically with the purpose of sending the right message, and installing the right ideas, in new users. Since we see our natural first adopters as people simply looking for new ways to gain traction and grow a more engaging website, we hope this can give people that idea.
To adopt this new visual identity more fully and also look more professional, we also now have a banner with the same design elements custom made for the steemit blog page.
For the logo, while the feedback we got from the community in our first steempress-io post was very positive, we realized when presenting it to people outside the Steem ecosystem that a common response was that it looked a lot like a messaging application. To take the focus back to content, we decided to make the small change of removing the arrow on the bottom corner to make it look less like a chat bubble.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need a wordpress.com business account?
No, you can use SteemPres with any web hosting providers out there. While Wordpress.com provides a free hosting service, it comes without the option to use plugins. For this, you will have to upgrade to the highest plan which is very expensive compared to other plans.
For price-sensitive users, we've recommended the web hosting plan from ovh. You are, of course, free to use any other host of your liking. We also recommend you to pick the "one click WordPress install" option which will directly install WordPress on your server to make things easier.
What kind of server do I need
It all depends on your blog and how much it'll be visited. For most new users, you really shouldn't need a lot of data. In which case, the "personal" plan from ovh with 100gb of disk space is more than enough.
Do I need a domain name
No. Although having one is way better for your search engine optimization (SEO) and obviously more pretty. Ask yourself, have you ever enjoyed reading content from a website named 173.245.234.11?
Can I use a free domain or a subdomain?
Yes.
What are the beneficiaries?
15%
How can I ensure that the SEO of my blog is not affected?
SteemPress offers a feature to delay when an article is posted to the Steem blockchain. This means that you can choose to first publish your article on your blog before it is scheduled to be posted to the Steem blockchain at a time selected by the user. This means that Google and other search engines will index your blog first and tag steemit.com as a duplicate, meaning that your blog's SEO ranking won't be hurt.
I did not get a vote on my article, is something wrong?
You will not automatically get a vote as soon as you start using SteemPress. There are two reasons for this: First, we make it our first priority to avoid upvoting spam and/or plagiarized content. To ensure this, all new users are briefly screened before a curator or our voting bot will cast any votes on a post made by a newly registered account. With 50-100 new users signing up every day, it takes some time to review everyone. We invite new users to give a link to their post in our #post-promotion tab on Discord which may help us notice you sooner. Be aware that if the post is found to be spam and/or plagiarized, you will end up on our blacklist and will not receive further upvotes. Second, please consider a vote from @steempress-io as a tip for producing good content with us rather than as an expected reward. You don't expect a tip, but you are happy when you get one. The same mentality should apply here.
As mentioned in the previous post, steempress-io votes based on a mix of trailing trusted curators, manual upvotes by us to welcome new users and automated upvotes based on our internal whitelist and ranking system.
What can I do to get a higher @steempress-io vote?
When deciding on a user's rank, we use a few simple rules to guide our decision:
- Do the user make content that is original and of high quality?
- Do their posts obtain engagement from users either on steemit.com or on their blog?
- Does their website look serious with links back to their Steem account with options for content to be shared?
As time goes by and we obtain more users, we will prioritize users whose posts help achieve the mission statement of SteemPress: To see the best WordPress content on the Steem blockchain, and the Steem blockchain made visible to WordPress consumers all over the web.
Who do I talk to about business and partnerships?
If you have any questions about how your community can cooperate with steempress-io, or that you would like to do business with us, then please contact @fredrikaa on our Discord channel or send an email to [email protected]
Who do I talk to about technical details, bugs etc?
For any challenges or experienced difficulties with using SteemPress please resort to making a post in the #help or #suggestion channels on Discord. For more urgent matters, you can send a direct message to @Howo, still on the SteemPress Discord.
I published my post on WordPress but it was not published on steem what's up?
Check the plugin settings to make sure that you have set everything correctly. you should see
"Connectivity to the steem server: Ok
Username/posting key: Ok
"
If that's ok, look at the delay, did you put any delay? And is that delay over?
If all of that checks, then something went wrong, come in the #help channel and we'll figure it out.
Can I use this on my phone
We got that question a lot so I feel like we need to answer it.
No. You need a WordPress blog which needs to be hosted. So you can buy hosting with your phone and manage it
still from your phone but you'll have to go by the "hosting" section and get a blog there.
For all the questions related to Steem please see:
https://steemit.com/faq.html
We hope this post can help answer some of the more common questions asked and can be used by our growing community of users as a reference to questions they might get from people they encourage to try SteemPress.
We would like to thank you all again for the very positive feedback, support and suggestions you've provided us so far and are more excited than ever to continue developing and growing SteemPress and the Steem blockchain together with you!
As always, SteemPress on!
@fredrikaa and @howo
@fredrikaa and @howo thanks so much for this update. It explains a great deal, including why I haven't been able to access the plugin. I have a premium susbscription and the USD to ZAR exchange rate, coupled with the little income I'm generating through both WordPress and Steemit, an upgrade is not justified.
That said, I am very excited about this and hope that, in time, it will become available to premium users. I do appreciate the investment that's gone into the development.
I shall not be leaving the discord channel: I hope that its members will hear of new developments as and when they happen. I really do appreciate what WordPress does to protect its bloggers and to promote good content, especially the longer reads. Similarly, the platform is great to use and offers so much more than other platforms. Now, I have to ask, whether retaining both the WP and the Steemit accounts is sensible.
Thanks again, and I will continue to follow developments.
Are you using wordpress.com? Frankly I have never seen the use for wordpress.com itself and after seeing their pricing even less so. You are able to get more than adequate hosting from Afrihost for only R50 , this includes 5 subdomains so you can have your blog separate from maybe other sites you build. Full access to a simple wordpress installer with HTTPS via cpanel.
You might have a bit of a mission getting the domain pulled from wordpress.com since you would want to do that, but also consider if you get the package I am talking about on Afrihost they give you a free .co.za domain. Once a year you can pay the domain costs for your .com and the .co.za which is only like R250 a year.
Now I am not trying to sell you anything , just look at options. Why I mention this is because for R50 a month you can install all the plugins and themes you want, own your website and your content, setup as many business emails as you require. Silly things that these hosting platforms charge for.
I do not know what you mean by what wordpress does to promote content, since I have never seen wordpress promote anything so can't speak to that. Hope you have a look at some of the better options available in South Africa since companies like wordpress or the wannabe little design guy on the corner is not going to tell you what can be done on the cheap. Good luck.
@penderis I have been using the WordPress platform for more than 4 years - one as a personal blog and the other as a website. I selected the platform, and I still like it, because I don't know coding, but I have a certain amount of savvy, to set up a website, choose a theme, make use of a wide range of widgets and plug-ins that do what I need, and most importantly, I control the content and the updating - on my terms. And frankly, more quickly. For each I pay $99/a.
In terms of WP relinquishing them, it's easy to pull those: I just don't renew the subscription and they revert to a free WP blog; all I would have to do is update the links which I will have to do now that I have secured a WP blog via @vornix.
Also, one is precluded from purchasing the relevant domain names because once I relinquish them, they're not owned by anyone. When I took the subscriptions WP only offered .com and for one of them I have also been able to set up free email, using the relevant domain name using Zoho. It served my purposes well for the need at the time.
In terms of promotion, I acknowledge that it's a bit of a closed shop, but within their not small community, they do curate and promote. I've never paid it much attention because it hasn't served my purposes.
I will certainly look at Afrihost if I have a need in future, but for my most recent website, for a new business, I am using G-Suite which is working well.
Appreciate your stopping by and the advice.
Vornix. It is not a real domain, nor a suitable place to replace your wordpress.com.
It is only a subdomain. That at present, it does not even have HTTPS. Something absolutely ridiculous.
With your thought. You go from bad to worse.
With respect, @rosepac, that's a matter of opinion. Read again and you will see that I qualified what I said, based on my lack of skills and the type of platform I was looking for. I found one that was fit for my purpose, i.e. WordPress.
Similarly, I have not said that I intend relinquishing or replacing my WordPress blogs – I simply said that it could be done. In any event that would be rash decision in the short term, especially as I've not thought through their futures in relation to what they carry, i.e. the purposes they serve for me, and in relation to what WordPress offers which, I say again, for my purposes are value for money. Again, as someone not familiar with coding and much, much more interested in writing and, to some, pretty pictures, the WordPress platform is really user-friendly and suits my purposes.
Incidentally, in just under a year on @steemit and only the last few months of any real activity, I have built a following and a reputation it took me three years to build on my WordPress personal blog. I say again: from the perspective of ease and speed of posting (i.e. time), the platform is far superior to the Steemit editor.
Yes, I have understood this.
And I seemed to understand that you said that "vornix" It was a better option of the wordpress (wordpress.com?) that you had before.
Only said you; that is not an option, nor an improvement. Don´t have HTTPS and it. Is to be dead in the eyes of google and any other search engine.
That can be horrible for you and your blog.
It does not require great knowledge to create your wordpress. None of programming.
In fact any server that allows to install wordpress.org with Softaculous.
It gives you a wordpress password, just as gave it "vornix"; after paying them and making three clicks.
Much better spend your money on buying a domain.
-Sorry for my english-.
Appreciate your reply - and your English is 100% better than my Spanish. Your points about HTTPS is well made, and why I will hang on to the other blog, and probably run the two in parallel. The two communities are quite different. The second, I use as a website and am considering collapsing that entire business into another and on to that website which is on G-Suite.
Thanks again, I appreciate your considered reply.
I've been using SteemPress for the past 4 months or so and love it. Happy to answer any questions ppl might have.
Simple question: I can’t seem to find the link to download the plugin. Do we have to search for it within our wp backend?
How can i as a new blogger benefit or even consider using #SteemPress, i'm really passionate to the potentials of this platform.
Hi lonelysoul, this is something I'm trying to help people walk through. Do you have a .com site of your own that can run WordPress?
No Sir, like I said I am just starting.
We'll, just start by learning how to use Steem. I see that cheetah flagged your first post. If you are passionate about your faith, that is ok, but you can't repost something somebody else wrote without attribution.
I really don't know anything about steempres ? How can I start ? should I just make a tag steempress or what ?
SteemPress is a plug-in for people who have WordPress blogs. It automatically cross posts their content to Steem.
ow...you really help me to understand, thank you
@protegeaa Is there a limit on the number of users we can add in the plugin? Also is there an option to noindex/nofollow the posts created in SteemPress? Do you have experience with any SEO issues after using the plugin and do you schedule your posts for a later date?
Thanks for the questions! I am currently experimenting with time delayed publishing to maximize SEO. I started with concurrent publishing, and am now at 20 minutes. I want to delay as long as possible without steem cleaners or cheatah flagging me for plagiarism (it's my own work, but that's not necessarily obvious to a bot).
I'm not sure of there is a limit on users but you can allow different authors on your blog to post to their own Steem account with their own posting keys, which is a new feature.
@protegeaa Thanks for replying to me so quickly, definitely going to look into this plug for my site, and good to know we can have different authors with different Steemit accounts as I was thinking about doing a community site for friends where we can all post from while using WP to edit will make things a little easier, plus the saved time is great.
I was worried what Cheetah etc would think, but I guess if we no-index/no-follow the posts then maybe they won't pick them up.
Definitely worth a test in my opinion, looks like a really good plugin to use on WP.
You can check out my blog on here, where everything in the last 5-6 months started on WP, and zero cheetah hits.
No need to worry about no index/no follow.
You can set up your friends accounts yourself if you have 14sp to delegate and .5 Steem per person. Vessel will help you do this. Better than having to wait for Steemit Inc to get to your friends' signups.
Hi @protegeaa thanks for the tip on friends accounts, and great to hear that you've not had any Cheetah hits! I do already have a couple of friends that are here on Steemit, one of them created my account so I wouldn't need to create any new ones, but it's really handy to know if we do.
Thanks again for answering my questions so quickly!
Hi @protegeaa I was wondering, do you know if SteemPress is compatible with custom post types with the new Divi 3.10 builder update? Just don't want to crash it or mess up the steemit posts is all.
I have no idea, sorry. @howo is the developer; you could ask him.
That's really great that you are willing to help others, @protegeaa. I'm just getting my WP site set up now. My plan is to create menus for several of the different types of posts I write (Short stories, micro fiction, and articles on writing), as well as a "blog". I plan to manually post snippets of my Steemit blog posts to the various pages on my WP blog, with links back to Steemit. Then as I post new things, I will post them to the WP blog (auto-posting at the same time to Steemit) and I will manually add links from the themed posts to the other pages (short stories, etc.).
Does this methodology sound like it will work?
Yeah, it should. Give it a try and see how it goes. Are you using Analytics for your blog?
I just shifted my delay time from WP to Steem to 10 minutes (from 0). Trying to up my SEO on my WP site...we'll see!
Well, I "have a guy." He's creating my site for me. If I did it myself it would happen in geologic time due to my busy schedule. I'm trying to decide whether to set it up as a website or purely as a blog. I decided on a website format -- i.e. menus for the different categories of content I post on Steemit, vs. a tag cloud.
I will definitely set up the time delay. Thanks for the tip!
Yes, just search for SteemPress in the plug-in tab.
It's in your WordPress admin page.
I also have my logo in the good wordpress style
That one looks really awesome! :)
Great summary of FAQs. Thanks @fredrikaa and @howo for clearing this out. Now I just need to send this article to explain each and everything about the plugin. Game on! Cheers. ;)
Thanks for the comment and for all your contributions!
Yes, I hope this can be a reference that helps people answer common questions
Will have mine set up in a few days! You guys are awesome! 🙌🏼🙌🏼
It's absolutely flawless. Used it twice so far and it's been brilliant. Captures exactly how you format your blog in WordPress directly to Steemit. So awesome!
Cool to hear! Let me know when you make your first post :)
I'm very excited about this project @howo & @fredrikaa — this is literally game changing!
This is the best part...
This is incredible. I really have to start posting more now that I have @steempress-io. ♥️
Happy to have you with us @omitaylor! I think and hope we can do something very beneficial to both bloggers and to tge Steem ecosystem.
here are all answered questions that often arise Thank you
hot hot hot, love steem :V. will check this out sounds very interesting greez s. error
I am in love with this project, God bless you and fill you with success and abundance ....
Thanks! Happy to hear that you love it and to see that it helps you achieve your goals :)
Thanks for the answers