My OS Steem Projects & Future Plans

in #utopian-io ā€¢ 6 years ago

Hello Hello šŸ‘‹

steem-projects2.jpg

The code for the projects I talk about is available on Github code-with-sam

Another week passes by and Iā€™ve been doubling down on figuring out how best to proceed with my projects. I wanted to share a little background along with some extra thoughts.

As youā€™re aware over the past year (yes its almost a year already) Iā€™ve been working on many open source projects. Primarily my projects have been running on the STEEM Blockchain. While there has been some success and traction in these projects Iā€™ll be first to say that there is nothing groundbreaking to report. With that In mind I needed to take a step back. Time to check-in with myself to see if these projects are worthwhile to wider community. It would be easy for me to just-keep-going but feel its important to check youā€™re going in the right direction .

When I re-discovered STEEM at the end of last year I dove straight into learning about the available APIā€™s. I started smashing out all sorts of project ideas. This post from 10 months ago details a few of the ideas I was building.

  • Steem Compare
  • Steem Notifier
  • Steemversary [Bot] + [Website]
  • Steemconnect Node Boilerplate
  • Steepshot Scheduling Tool
  • Steem Share Button
  • Steem Token Diversifer Tool
  • Steem Bot Tutorials
  • Steem Comments Plugin

Looking at this list, itā€™s now pretty obvious I was working on too many ideas. I was learning,I was excited about the opportunity to build projects on STEEM. It felt like there was another chance at the internet of old, where itā€™s not ā€˜everything has already been made five times overā€™.

I dug deeper into the Steem Comments Plugin which became Finally Comments. I sunk a decent amount of time into the mac app Steem Notifier. I also kept making tutorials whilst learning.

From there my ideas started to get more ambitious.

Finally šŸ˜‰ all of these projects culminated into @finallynetwork. I thought Finally might be able to encompass many of these ideas together. It worked to solve the main problem I had encounter over the past year - ā€˜talking about and sharing steem posts/project was a bit grossā€™. It's difficult from an outside perspective to see past the dollar amounts and ā€˜less-than-stellarā€™ steemit.com UI. My thoughts with FinallyNetwork was to put the power of how the content looks back into the hands of the users.

So thatā€™s a very brief rundown of what happened. Completely open to talk more about my thought process.

Where am I at now?

Finally network

I am still excited about the potential for Finally. With the release of @engrave (similar to Finally). It's important to differentiate the projects. There is nothing wrong with competition, in-fact it is a great thing for the community. That said It's not the best use of my time to re-invent the wheel as a solo-developer.

I will still be working on @finallynetwork but my main aim will focus on collaborations/custom sites and Patreon style features (support this creator etc).

Finally Comments

I've taken a considerable step back from working on Finallycomments. Why? the target market of users who would install this plugin is tiny. A better approach is to work directly with projects/website owners who want ta deeper integration with STEEM. Any thoughts?

Goodbooks.reviews

I still feel there is huge potential to compete against Goodreads.

Recipehero

Spotted @dtaste yesterday - may have a missed boat here. Still don't think everything needs to be called dSomething though

Moveclub

There is now @actifit (did not exist when I was creating moveclub) - very different than I had imagined move club. Still a big potential to create a more integrated platform with other leading tracking tools. That or push for a platform that focuses on documenting/sharing/improving training.

Photofeed

I still like this site and believe there is potential for the @photofeed community to live and breathe in its own eco-system not on other STEEM interfaces.

These ideas lead me to ask a couple basic questions -

What platforms do I want to exist and support on the blockchain?
Are these platforms just because ā€˜blockchainā€™ or do they have a real purpose in the eco-system?


My current thoughts and next steps are to double down on tutorials. I've received the most positive responses, questions and engagement when sharing coding tutorials.

Follow @codewithsam if you want to be first inline to hear more about the next chapter.

As always I'm super keen to hear about your thoughts on my projects.

Sort: Ā 
Ā 6 years agoĀ (edited)

Quite a bunch of awesome projects, but I'm more intrigued about the Finallycomment.com. I was wowed when I open the URL, I bump into the project a few months ago, but I never gave it a deep check as I did now. Absolutely, all your projects are pretty cool. Huh!
I'll check the finallycomment more. Hopefully, I might share some ideas to better the project.
In a blog post like this, it would have been better if you could provide more details about your projects.
Above all, I admire and appreciate your impressive projects, keep them updated :))

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Thank you for your review, @tykee! Keep up the good work!

Hey! Thanks for taking a look at my post.

Really awesome to hear you were wowed by Finallycomments! Please if you have ideas to make it better I'm all ears to make updates. I've stagnated a little on finallynetwork because the target market of website owners who also use STEEM blockchain based sites is still fairly small. I'm not 100% sure of the best way to proceed.

Thanks again. I'll br writing more in-depth about this projects as they develop. šŸ‘Š

Iā€™ve always been intrigued by all of your projects. In particular Iā€™ve dabbled a lot with Finally. Iā€™ll admit Iā€™ve used SteemPress quite a bit more now that theyā€™ve also added 2 way synchronization supporting comments, but Finally still has some features not yet matched like guest commenting & moderation.

With so many teams & projects moving forward & overlapping, if youā€™re not going to go full on head-to-head with one; Iā€™d love to see development of more simple standalone widgets that could work with any website be it WordPress, Squarespace, desktop HTML builders, etc.
Items as simple as your embeddable vote button are amazing for the armchair web designer like me. Iā€™d make use of more widgets that spread Steem across the web. Stylable widgets akin to the embedded Twitter & FaceBook feed & follow boxes that are ubiquitous.

On some of my sites Iā€™m simply taking screenshots of a Steepshot post and placing it in a sidebar as an image link to Steepshot, a poor manā€™s widget if you will! Itā€™d be great to have a dynamically updating real thing!

Ultimately though, just tackle whatever keeps you curious and creatively satisfied!

Thanks for the continued support. I appreciate you've been able to use some of these projects over the past year.

It's ideas like the embeddable upvote button that I think could do with more exposure or explanation. I think it's cool but I imagine nobody knows it exists šŸ¤·ā€ā™‚ļø.

I can totally make an embeddable widget. When it comes to having the universal login setup (aka the upvote button already has you logged in if you use finallycomments etc) so users can vote/follow without needing to relogin - that needs to be an iframe and therefore cant be styled by the third party. I could make widgets that can be styled (add html/css/js to the page) but they would need to use steemconnect signing and open a popup or newtab to interact with the blockchain.

If you link me the steepshot example you're currently using I can make you a widget.

Yes!!!
Your tutorials are absolutely my favorite things that you do. One thing you do well that others don't seem to do is keep each tutorial in its own separate Github thingy.... I've tried a lot of tutorials, and most don't keep the code for Tutorial 1 if the creators have already moved onto Tutorial 5.

Thanks mate, great to hear. I'm pretty excited to step up a gear on tutorials, both learning new things myself and sharing everything I've picked up along the way :)

Thanks for the tip - I'll make a note of keeping each separate part of tutorials as I go through šŸ‘Š

Awesome... I'm pretty sure you were already doing that.. but yeah, it makes a big difference, and allows your readers to target the tutorials of interest to them.

What sort of areas are you thinking of tutorialising? You know I still check out your bot tutorials a couple of times a month... I'd argue that I've gotten more value out of those guys than anyone else for any other post in the history of the blockchain.

I'm going to go back over the bot tutorials first, see whats changed and add some new ideas. if there's anything specific you think would be useful send them over! Also if there is anything you've found does/doesn't work will with your bots I can include that.

Next is basically everything...

I wrote a long list of ideas a year ago! I have been wanting to focus more on tutorials ever since I left London 3 years ago but have always found excuses to not. Putting that behind me and diving in.

Preferably everything will be wrapped up into small projects. I prefer this style than just learning fundamentals.

Platforms - Ghost, Wordpress, Shopify, Jekyll (+look at newer static site gens - gatsby/vuepress etc)
Fun things - Raspberry Pi, Arduino, games with web-sockets
JS data vis - SVG/D3.js
Frameworks - Rails/Express/Nuxt (currently learning)
Hosting/APIs/Git/

The list gets a bit ridiculous to be honest but that's part of it. I hope to share/explain that this stuff takes time and there is an unending amount of stuff to learn. Take what you can and build as you go.

Hahaha, I can't believe you haven't already completed tutorials for Basically Everything yet... so slack.

I think I went through either your first or second bot tutorial last weekend, and to my surprise it all still worked... it just wasn't exactly what I needed. I've been through a few older tutorials using Dsteem and every single one of them was broken... I'm wondering if Dsteem had to change it's code after HF20.

Personally... I think it would be really handy to have a new, working tutorials on:

  • How to display data from the blockchain
  • How to post to the blockchain
  • How to vote to the blockchain
  • How to hook up SC2 and/or keychain

I've been through a few of the Steem-developers tutorials for JavaScript, and they mostly don't work either. They might be too old, or maybe they hook into testnet (but haven't explained how I would also do that) so they've been pretty useless to me... especially since I'm trying to use React... but there still should be some use in there.

Your boilerplate thing was so good... I honestly loved it... but I also didn't have the prerequisite knowledge to make anything but the most basic of changes. I had never heard of PUG before that... so maybe some tutorials on how to use your boilerplate?

Lots of non-techie Steemians have so many ideas that I think your Boilerplate could really, really help with.

Also.. have you checked out @exhaust? It's more similar to Move Club than Actifit is.. it's all python/dgango, but if that's code that you know I'm sure there's lots to play with there if you were interested...

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Oh wow. I didn't know this was a thing! Thanks so much @utopian-io and I guess Tykee and/or Mcfarhat.

hey @sambillingham,

Glad to hear you will get back to writing tutorials, we missed seeing quality content from you there on Utopian!

On the Actifit side of this (being the founder), if you believe there is anything you could help with, particularly in development, would love to chat and discuss further about this. Just hit me up on discord @mcfarhat#6013

Hey, @sambillingham!

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Weā€™re already looking forward to your next contribution!

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