It's two weeks since we released the v1.0 of our wordpress plugin, SteemPress, and announced that the plugin is available in the wordpress.org plugin-store in @fredrikaa's post. Much has been worked on since then to address the many suggestions and requests we got from our new users and so we would like to share some news on the project.

If you would like to try SteemPress, here is where you can find our plugin on wordpress.org.

Statistics

One of our stated goals in the previous post was to set up a database to log statistics of who uses the plugin, how many posts are made per day, etc. This was done shortly after the v1 release and we were overwhelmed by the numbers!

In 2 weeks SteemPress has published 8658 posts, 618 articles per day on average, from 286 different bloggers. Needless to say, neither of us expected early adoption to happen this quickly. This only motivated us to work even harder to provide you the best product possible and also to add supporting mechanisms to benefit our users.

We are still very early on in the process and working on ideas to drastically increase those numbers once we have the time and resources to execute them. More on that soon!

New features

You can now post all your existing wordpress articles directly with steempress!

Peek 2018-02-17 20-08.gif

This was by far the most common request we received from WordPress users commenting on our earlier posts. As the gifs illustrates, you can now select any of your old WordPress posts that you would like to post to the STEEM blockchain. You can either post them one by one at your desired pace, or select many and SteemPress will post them with the 5 minute enforced interval demanded by the blockchain.

As the message states, don't expect it to be instantaneous. Also if your bandwidth can not handle 200 articles in one go, then be patient!

We now handle all of the WordPress default shortcodes

Which means no more ugly [gallery] or [audio] tag etc hanging around. For now we delete them, but in the near future we'll try to render a maximum of them to deliver an experience on STEEM that's as close as possible as the one you're delivering on your blog.

Error detection

We worked a lot to detect and log most all of the occurring errors users faced so that we always know why a post has failed. If you still experience some of your posts not being immediately uploaded to STEEM, then don't hesitate to come to us so we can provide you some assistance.

The most frequent errors observed:

Wrong key (Likely due to the user using their public posting key or something else altogether).
A depleted bandwidth (Mainly an issue for a few frequent spammers)
Two posts being posted too fast (without the 5 minutes in between that STEEM requires).

Fast posting

Speaking of posts that don't respect STEEM's cooldown. We now handle fast posting, so you can submit several articles without having to wait 5 minutes between them, we'll time them out on our end so they get posted correctly.

Voting weight

When you check the "self vote" option, it means that you vote for yourself at 100% when the post is published, at some point some of our users got some errors because they had 0 voting power left. If that case happens, we now remove the self voting from that post and still publish it without it.

Image alignment

SteemPress now automatically aligns your images to fit steemit's requirements.

Along with various small fixes/features

Automatic post delay whenever the STEEM node is down. Every now and then, the STEEM node goes down if only for a matter of seconds. Whenever this happens, SteemPress will now delay posts that are made by a few minutes rather than failing to post them.

When making a post, users can now write their username both with or without the "@" sign in front of their name, removing unnecessary errors.
Tags with dashes are correctly sent to the blockchain. (previously, if a user typed "steem-press" as a tag, it would be posted with "steempress" on the blockchain).
If the title is too large for STEEM (256 character) it will automatically get trimmed and "..." will be added to the end.
Fixed the image tags that were not rendered correctly if they were closed with ">" instead of "/>"
Updated the text of the seo line users can add to the end of their posts"original post : url" to "posted from my blog with SteemPress : url". This makes it more clear that you are the author and that you are not citing a source for where you found the content elsewhere on the web.
Handle emojis and other special characters.

All of the recent updates have been to address expressed user interests and issues and making the plugin more and more seamless. We're particularly happy with the way in which we manage to stay on top of occurring errors so that whenever we are approached by users who have experienced an error, we are already aware and working on a solution. We do, however, highly appreciate all of the user engagement we have had over the recent weeks. Please do continue to let us know anything SteemPress could add which would benefit your blogging and steeming experience.

Created @steempress-io STEEM account and bought domain name steempress.io

Since our announcement, we have created a dedicated STEEM account for SteemPress, @steempress-io, which we intend to use the account to curate quality content uploaded with SteemPress to incentivize further use of the tool, and bought the domain name steempress.io.

Objectives for the next 2 weeks:

Have established curation rules and guidelines for posts submitted via SteemPress and begin to test active curation with @steempress-io based on those guidelines.
Set up an open database on steempress.io where people can browse content published using SteemPress. We will begin experimenting with alternative ways for content discovery as we intend to work with steemit communities to help them find the best content uploaded to STEEM via SteemPress. The website will also serve as a tool for curators to check whether or not an article on steemit is indeed uploaded via SteemPress, or plagiarized from another blog.

If you have any questions regarding SteemPress then feel free to contact either @howo or @fredrikaa on steemit.chat or join us on the #steempress channel.

Thank you again for your support! It's what keeps us going!