I joined Steem barely 2 weeks ago, and yet it feels like I've been here forever. In that time, I've done quite a lot.
This witness update will be my first update, and includes everything I've done up until now (most things were this week anyway).
As a witness, I'm expected to help Steem grow in any way I can, whether that's building community resources, helping people out in chat, or actually developing new services, features, or fixes.
Of course most importantly, I run a witness node 24/7, which creates new blocks, allowing the network to run like it does.
1 ) SteemDNS
SteemDNS was my original proposal for Dan's suggestion about DNS via Steem. This was the very basic system allowing it to work, prior to having a nice UI (coming up next).
It has been my most successful achievement thusfar (the post hit $2,700 and was on the front page for almost 2 days).
Post: STEEM DNS - Your username DOT STEEM. DNS on the Blockchain
2 ) SteemDNS Web UI + proxy domain
After seeing the massive success of SteemDNS, I decided to continue my work on it. I created a web UI using ReactJS, and svk's SteemJS that allowed users to manage their DNS through a point and click Web UI, with thorough help at the bottom of the page.
I knew that many users wouldn't want to change their DNS settings, so I set up a proxy/mirror domain, e.g. someguy123.user.steem.network to go along with the launch of the service.
While the post was a lot less successful than I would have liked, it still hit $883 (after dropping from $1,200).
Post: .STEEM domains with SteemDNS Web UI and Mirror Domain (EASY TO USE)
3 ) STEEM.CENTER (Wiki)
One of my first problems joining Steem, was that the documentation was (and still is) absolutely awful.
I maintain a lot of community resources in the LTC community, and decided to try my hand at running a Wiki by myself for Steem. I called it STEEM.CENTER (there weren't many TLDs left for Steem, so I have STEEM.NETWORK and STEEM.CENTER)
Unfortunately the post was a complete and utter flop (barely hitting $5), but eventually I did get recognized by @ned - who may be hiring people to actually work on writing articles among other resources.
Note: everyone is welcome to sign up and make your own contributions, we have information for both new users and developers alike.
Post: STEEM.CENTER - Center of all things STEEM
4 ) Added the ability to vote for non-top-50 witnesses on Steemit.com
I knew that few people actually use the CLI_WALLET in the age of Steemit, and found it quite awful that you couldn't vote for witnesses outside of the top 50 on the Steemit Witness Page, being that I was a witness outside of the top-50, this affected me pretty directly.
I grabbed the Steemit.com source from Github, and dug into the code to see how quickly I could get a fix out for this. I created a simple text box at the bottom of the page (originally at the top, but they asked me to move it to the bottom), which allowed you to enter any witness name you wanted, regardless of whether they were in the top 50 or not.
I made a post once my changes went live on Steemit, along with various other updates. The post was mildly successful, earning me ~$40 total for my contribution.
Post: [Steemit Update] You can now vote on witnesses who are outside the TOP 50
5 ) Wrote Steemit CSS for Macdown, so Mac users have a better Steemit editor
This is a relatively small achievement, after getting frustrated with how terrible the Steemit editor is (I mean come on, the preview on the Steemit site does NOT match what actually shows up on the post).
The post was a complete flop (I didn't expect it to go anywhere), but it's helped me out personally, I'm using Macdown to write this post right now, with my customised Steemit styles.
Post: [GUIDE] Use OSX? Here's the best Steemit post editor, with custom preview for Steemit
6 ) Set up a witness and a seed, and successfully upgraded to 0.13.0 without missing a block
This one is a somewhat normal achievement for any witness, nevertheless, many people in the #witness channel were having hell trying to get 0.13.0 to compile properly.
I run a witness on this account, someguy123, as well as a seed at seed.steem.network:2001. I managed to upgrade to 0.13.0 days before the hard fork, and had no problems during the hard fork.
7 ) Helped out many users on the Steemit chat
I've been very active on Steemit.Chat, I've helped people set up their own witness, I've helped people set up seeds, I've also directed users to various articles about their curation rewards, flagging, and helped people with developing their STEEM applications.
I'm available at various times, in most of the major Steemit Chat channels, including general, promotion, and smaller ones such as dev, steemitabuse-classic, witness.
Overall, it's been a very very productive week for myself. I've stayed up countless hours working on various Steemit projects, helping people in the chat, and of course, writing articles like this.