When almost everybody was unable to post due to the lack of resource credits after HF20 last week, @anomadsoul came up with a great idea: In the get to know me challenge, everybody willing to participate should make a compilation of their top 10 posts since they joined Steemit. @eoj nominated me to join the challenge, so here is my "Steem resume":
My #introduceyourself post
I joined Steem(it) in November last year, only a week before the SBD price started its journey to the moon and slowly back down to earth. Back then, I announced what my posts would be about:
- Collections of my best travel photos
- Travel advice: Real experiences on a low budget instead of standard tourism
- Advice on how to sell stock photos (and how to finance your travels by doing so!)
- My thoughts on photography, travel, blockchain, technology and some more cool stuff
Reintroducing myself on @sndbox
This post was published only recently, but not on my own account, but on the @sndbox incubator that I am lucky to be part of. It goes a lot deeper than my initial #introduceyourself post and covers a lot of the idealistic reasons why I am on Steemit. I will cover my Steemit journey in this post as well, but I really recommend giving it a read if you really want to understand me ;)
My first @curie upvote
I mentioned this post in my post for @sndbox above: After a few weeks on Steemit, I wanted to see if quality content actually had value here, and so I spent a lot of time editing my photos from Trinidad, Cuba and compiling an extensive travel post. On Christmas Eve, I received a Curie upvote and due to the sky-high crypto prices at the time, the post was worth over 600€ at payout. It is one of my best posts that I am still proud of today:
My first bid-bot experience
Motivated by the success of my previous Cuba post, I posted another post about Cuba a week later, not knowing about @curie's 14-day policy. Frustrated about the post sitting at a few Dollars (due to the high Steem price, at the time upvotes where much higher than today!), I sent a few SBD to bid-bots. I got extremely lucky since the Steem price doubled within the next days and so did my payout and ROI! Despite that, I have never used bid-bots on a post again - I believe in real upvotes and human curation which was why we came up with the idea for @travelfeed in January after @for91days and I had launched a home for the travel community: the Steemit Traveller's Discord.
On a break from Steemit: Travelling to Morocco
My first - and so far, only - break from posting on Steemit was when I travelled to Morocco in February. Not willing to buy a local sim card, I suffered from slow internet speeds on the one hand and enjoyed being offline on the other hand. The time that I spend on my laptop, I spent launching @travelfeed with the rest of the team, polishing our introduction post and even translating it to German while waiting for a shared taxi to depart. At one point, I was in a hostel where the internet speed was so "fast" that it was actually possible to upload heavily compressed photos to Steemit and I sat down and wrote a post about my experiences in the Sahara. It is a fun read!
Getting into Steem development
In the following months, I reduced the activity on my own blog to mostly shorter photo posts and focussed on TravelFeed. When launching the #travelfeed tag, we had introduced several criteria, but we were still receiving posts falling short of them every day. In order to keep the tag clean from the short posts flooding #travel, we had to comment manually on each short post - a repetitive task that took time (especially with the 20-second comment limit!) that we could have used for curation instead.
This is why I decided to create a bot to automate these tasks. I am studying computer science, but please don't be as naive as I was when I started university to actually believe that they teach us anything practical there (how am I the only one with a Github account after more than a year of studying computer science?). Needless to say, my programming experience was limited to the basics of C# that I had learned at university, but mostly to the web development in PHP that I had done in my free time since high school. I had never programmed with Python before, but after looking into @steempytutorials and spending a lot of time experimenting, I was able to finish the first version of the TravelFeed bot. When I look at the code today, I am quite shocked by how bad it is, but I am really thankful for the support I received from @utopian-io despite that which motivated me to keep going.
Steem development past TravelFeed
I really enjoy writing code for Steem, especially after I switched from steem-python to the excellent and well-documented beem library by @holger80. Over the last months, I wrote several pieces of code that help me with my daily Steem routines. Now, I don't need to stop posting when I travel like I did when I went to Morocco: I wrote my own script to schedule my photo posts way past the possibilities that tools such as Steemauto offer. Also, my recent posts in the footer of each post are updated automatically, how awesome is that? ;) I am working on a series of #utopian-io tutorials covering how to write these scripts - this is the first post introducing how I automatically create EXIF captions for my photos:
Shorter travel posts
I was lucky to gain some regular support in form of autovotes over the past months. With a lot of time spent on editing the photo, creating a short photo post takes longer than non-photographers would anticipate, but it is still little time compared to creating longer travel posts. Sadly, thanks to my regular autovotes, my posts no longer qualify for curie upvotes and since we exclude our team from receiving TravelFeed upvotes, it was demotivating to see that my travel posts did usually get the same or even lower upvotes than my photo-posts - while at the same time, consuming much more time as well as photos that I would have otherwise used for shorter posts. This is one of my favourite shorter travel posts:
Getting into @sndbox and my new trip
Just after I had left Germany to start my current trip, I received a mail from @sndbox welcoming me to the new cohort of their incubator! This is an amazing opportunity and finally I am able to get rewarded for my longer posts again. My first post in #sndbox was about the first days of my trip taking me from Germany to Copenhagen, Bangkok and Myanmar:
More quality posts
Despite the @sndbox upvotes only being worth a few Euros due to the current Steem price - no adequate "pay" to justify hours of "work" - these upvotes are really encouraging. I think it has the same effect as what we hope to archive with @travelfeed. I started working on various posts that I had had in mind for several months. Remember that I mentioned stock photography in my #introcueyourself post? ;) Well after 9 months, on a rainy day in Myanmar, the "baby" was born after I sat down for the whole day to write down my tips on how to get started with stock photography, something that I have been asked about over and over again:
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Unfortunately, a few days after that, my old laptop stopped charging and since I wanted to take advantage of the cheap macbook prices in Taiwan, it was not until three weeks ago that I got a new laptop. After all these weeks without a laptop, I needed to catch up on missed out laptop time and started coding like crazy and finished a much improved version of the TravelFeed bot. While I will be quite busy moving @travelfeed ahead in the next months together with the rest of the team, I will also finish some of my long-planned quality posts, including the second part of my guide on getting started with stock photography.
Since the get to know me challenge will end today, I am not going to nominate anyone else, but I really enjoyed going through my old Steemit posts, so a big thank you goes to @eoj and @anomadsoul!
Please Follow, Upvote and Resteem
If you like my content, don't forget to upvote this post and follow me for more photos and travel stories! Also, I will be happy if you leave a comment to tell me your thoughts and resteem this post to share my work!
All my photos are also available for licensing, please contact me through my Website or the Steemit Traveller's Discord
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