Having got back into the routine of coding, I've returned to an old project that I've been obsessing over for the past week. I've wanted to write an update numerous times but I kept thinking "just one more feature" so I didn't ever get around to it - often coding long into the night, despite the inevitable early start the following day!
Alas, I have (mostly) succeeded in getting to a good stage and am ready to find out what you think!
You may recall that @coding-gorilla was the account that I used to share my coding updates and I was working on a new interface for Steemit. I got disheartened when concerns were raised about logging in and at that point, I decided to move on to the Club Status tool instead. Since then, I've continued using my new interface to curate content which I've found much easier to do as I can remove a huge amount of shit.
With my rejuvinated passion for coding and an improved hosting provider (who won't delete my site on a whim), I've rewritten that interface so that it's far easier to maintain and build upon - which has also allowed me to include a few additional features.
👨👩👧👦 Target Audience
I've designed the site for people who want to blog and find content that they're interested in more easily. It's very much designed with a curators mindset and this is reflected by the features included so far.
🚫 Exclusions
The easiest place to start is by stating the things that you won't see by default (which you can include if you wish to do so).
- Bot Users - By default, any user that has delegated to a known voting bot will have their content hidden. I'm aware that not all bot users post utter crap everyday to get their vote but unfortunately for those few, the majority do.
- Blacklisted Tags - Similar to the above, there are some tags which are a tell-tale sign of shit content. krsuccess is the most used shit-spam-fest-bum-hole-crap.
- Blacklisted Users - These might be known plagiarists or they might just post the same photo every day. Whatever they've done for me to feel that they've wronged me, their content's also hidden by default.
If you do choose to view their content, I've included an appropriate icon so that you know.
Hopefully genuine users will thank me for this - there's a lot of shit, lazy content...
🔥 Burn STEEM
Steemit loves a bit of burn at the moment so I've highlighted all of the posts that use the burnsteem25 hashtag. I also spent far too long animating it but it's the details that make me feel proud of my work!
This tag also guarantees you an Engagement Challenge entry or Diary Game.
🏷 Tags
Just like the previous time I released this interface, the popular tags and tag cloud are back and working. Each additional tag will allow you to target more and more specific content.
📬 Active Posts Only
At the moment, the interface will only display content that has not yet paid out. I might change this in the future but today, it's just active posts.
♣ Club Status
Also like the previous release, the username is clickable which will take you through to my club status tool and the can of worms that might open.
⏭ Future Ideas
I've already got a bit of a to-do list which I'm happy to add to if you have any ideas. It currently comprises of (in no particular order):
- Pagination at the bottom of the page.
- Top level navigation - structure to be decided but will include an "Active Communities" tab - which will lead to a more interesting community page - which I could let community leaders customise - for a donation to me 😉
- Promoted Content - automated by transfers to the @null or @the-gorilla accounts.
- Promoted Authors - full width content for specific users - could be in conjunction with promoted content.
😃 The Joy of Coding
Whilst writing this, not everything went smoothly so I also thought I'd share some interesting features.
One thing that I talked about it my last update was the improved memory management that I'd learned so I included this from the outset. It's very easy to write a chunk of code with the priority of just getting it working but I made the conscious effort to destroy every variable that was created so that I don't overdo the memory usage.
Similar to how I monitored memory consumption, I also monitored load speeds and one section in particular performed extremely badly - Voting Bot Delegations. There wasn't much I could do to optimise the code and this feature alone would take 3 seconds to complete. Since delegations don't update very often, I decided that this information could be stored on a file on the server and one poor user ever 12 hours would get a 3 second performance hit when this list gets updated.
That's all that I can think of for now - I'm sure I've forgotten something but that's not unusual.
I suppose all that's left is for me to share a link...
👉 https://raptor.in.ua/steemit.php 👈
the-gorilla's Club Status Tool
In case you didn't know, I've created a tool to help users review their club status - showing them where their power's coming from, how much they're powering up, transferring out and who they share a wallet with amongst other things.
Please use it wisely.
👉 Launch Club Status Tool 👈
