SteemStats 0.2.0
New Features: following feed, notifications, comments, transactions, witnesses, voters, and a whole lot more.
If you're unaware, steemstats.com is a live dashboard for observing account activity - yours or anyone elses. There is no need to login, you simply enter the name of account(s) you wish to watch. Each account has a brief history loaded and is then monitored by your browser for future changes. It designed this way so you can check on things from any computer (and soon mobile devices), including untrusted devices.
With such a warm welcome for steemstats's initial release, I decided that I needed a way to give back and say thank you to everyone who visited the site and helped support me. So I combed through every bit of feedback from the intial post and incorporated much of that feedback into the site.
There's still much more to do, a few odd bugs to fix, but here's a quick rundown of the major features that have been added. Mostly thanks to you!
Following Posts Feed - Added in Update 0.2.1
This update was added 6 hours after the original post
I know I said I was done (at the end of the post), but this one was too important of a feature to hold back on. I've added a feed that shows the posts of everyone that your account(s) are following.
Currently if you visit any user's blog page on steemit (by clicking their username), you will see a Follow button. I don't think it does anything here on steemit yet, but that information is recorded in the blockchain. So now you can use steemstats to read a feed of posts by the people that the accounts you've selected are following!
Go ahead, visit my profile and click Follow in the upper right. My posts will now appear on your "Following" tab!
Notifications
I've integrated "growl" style notifications into the site. These small colorful blocks will popup in the lower right hand portion of the screen whenever an account you're following:
- finds a new pow block.
- receives an upvote on a post or comment.
- has a comment posted on a piece of authored content.
Each of these small notifications can be clicked on to visit the relevant content.
Future plans are to include user preferences for how they behave, chrome/desktop notifications, and more types of notifications such as rewards or transactions. This is slated for the next release, 0.3.0, likely sometime next week.
Monitoring Comments
One of the most popular requests from the community was the ability to watch not only posts, but the performance of comments written by the monitored accounts. This new Comments section pulls the 20 most recent comments (for each account).
Transaction Logs
The new transactions page is a live feed of the activity impacting your balances. To start with, it's displaying curation rewards and comment rewards. The plan is to expand this section into a history of the monitored accounts, a summary, and options to filter. These features are also likely to be included in the next release.
Voters, weights and shares - oh my
Another popular request was viewing detailed information about who was voting on posts. A small button has been added next to each post's voter count that loads up a window displaying all of the voters and their relevant information.
Steem Power
I've added a simple calculation that shows the 104-week conversion of Steem Power into Steem. I am planning on driving this page in a direction to help educate users on how Steem Power works.
Witnesses
Witnesses are something I have just started wrapping my head around and realizing the importance of. The new witnesses tab will hopefully put the concept of witnesses in front of more new people.
I would really love to put some informational links on this page. If anyone has recommendations for the best posts explaining witnesses and their importance, please share!
Sort all the things!
As more and more content becomes available, more and more filtering and sorting options are going to be needed. I starting really thinking about this with sorting, and now many of the column headers across the site are clickable allowing you to sort the data.
Some data wasn't possible to sort yet - but if you have requests for sortable columns, just ask!
My plans and what's coming up next
Having only found steemit about a week ago, I am going to slow down just a bit. I've been going hard pretty at steemstats/steempress/learning since I got here. I need to revisit some other projects and take a couple days off to decompress.
I've been incredibly impressed with this community and the developers behind the project. In the three years since I started learning about blockchain technology, this is the first that I feel I've been able to be a part of. Everything else I've experienced so far has just been either scams, HODL, and/or trolls.
On my radar for the next couple days:
- I'm going to finally get around to writing an introduction post.
- Rewriting parts of steempress.io, and then open sourcing it.
- Using steempress.io to make a blog for steemstats.com
- Create a new post with detailed changelog information about this new version (for that blog)
- Continue exploring @xeroc/piston-web-first-open-source-steem-gui and determining how best I can contribute to his fantastic work.
- Be more involved in slack, rather than the random comments.
- Play either XCOM2 or Overwatch... haven't decided yet, but I think I need a day of gaming
And a few things a bit further out into the future include:
- Building an API that monitors and records blockchain activity snapshots so we can have historical data on steemstats and other sites. The API will be publicly available for anyone to use.
- Writing some tutorials on what I've learned and how you can build applications like I have.
- Contributing to some of the amazing open source projects that have been floating around.