Hello Everyone!

Here is what I've been up to since my last witness post:

• I successfully upgraded my witness nodes and seed to HF 19!
• I am hosting a Steemit Meetup for anyone in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area on Saturday July 15. Details can be found in this post. A new post with the chosen location will be posted very soon. Whoever can make it, we would love to see you there!
• I have been spending a lot of time helping users in the steemit.chat "help" channel with various issues, mostly related to account creation.
• I continue to review and respond to issues in the steem and condenser GitHub repositories.
• I started working on a new marketing initiative 10,000 Flyers.
• I ran a bounty to collect a list of tips for new users, which I will be converting into an informative post.
• I created the latest edition of the Reports from the Witnesses series. This report provides the community with an aggregated report of all the witness reports from the past week.
• I posted a warning on the risks of leaving coins on exchanges.
• I have been involved in discussions on the impacts of the current bandwidth limitations and how it has been impacting new user signups.
• I posted a tutorial on how to delegate SP to another user using SteemConnect.
• I posted a warning to users to be very cautious when providing their private keys to third party websites (or users).
• I am working with @moata run a Facebook marketing campaign designed to attract new users to the site. Details here!
• Prior to HF 19, I created a post explaining potential changes in payout.
• The link in the "Quick Start Guide" on how to buy STEEM is way out of date, so I created a new guide with updated screen shots and instructions. I will be updating the 'quick start guide' with the new version the next time I submit edits.
• I submitted a pull request to update the BlockTrades links on Steemit.com to pre-load the BlockTrades UI with the appropriate coins (BTC and STEEM or SP) when users click on the 'Buy' links. I also added links to the Steemit.com wallet to sell STEEM, as well as to be able to buy and sell SBD via the wallet drop-downs. (Details here.) The changes are already up on the live site, so you can check them out in your Steemit.com wallet :)
• I submitted another pull request to lower the threshold for the 'vote slider' to appear from around 500 SP to around 125 SP. The pull request is still in review, but I am hopeful that it will get approved. Details are in this post.

Forward Looking Plans:

• Review and update the FAQ page to be consistent with any changes in HF19.
• Phase 2 of the 10,000 Flyers initiative.
• Creating a post with a collection of tips for new users.
• I'm still working on a few different condenser pull requests in the background. Details will be shared if/when I am able to successfully make the changes.
• Continue my involvement with existing projects.

Some Information / Suggestions:

• Steemit, Inc. is hiring developers! (JavaScript and Python) Info here.
• I recruited my boss to Steemit :) If anyone is interested in following his food blog, you can check him out here: @willwriteforfood
• Steemit.chat is currently down. The admins that run the site are aware of it and working to get it back online on newer/better hardware. Details can be found in this post.
• Steemit has proposed hardfork 20! The main intention of this HF is to make the user signup process more scaleable, to be able to handle a large volume of new user signups. I like where this is going :)

Summary of Current Witness Parameters:

• SBD Interest Rate: Due to the SBD peg consistently trading above $1.00, my interest rate is set to zero.
• Price Discount: Due to the SBD peg consistently trading above $1.00, I have zero discount on my price feed.
• Registration Fee: My registration fee is set to 0.20 STEEM. This would be approximately $12.90 to register a new account without delegation at the current market price, or $0.43 plus $63.43 of delegated SP for a delegated account. I would prefer to have it even less than this, so that non-delegated accounts were in the $3-5 range, but @smooth brought up a very good point that users with less than 5-6 SP are likely to run into bandwidth limitations. Therefore, 0.20 STEEM is as low as I can go without risking users being unable to use their accounts.
• Maximum Block Size: I updated my maximum block size to 131,072, which is 2x the current size. The intention of this is to help with the bandwidth limitations that new users run into if they have a small amount of SP. Details can be found in this post. With the new proposal for HF 20, I will be reviewing if this is still necessary. I may go back to 65,536 which is what the majority of the top 20 witnesses have it set to.

I welcome feedback if you think there are things that I can be doing better as a witness. If you think I am doing a great job, I would really appreciate your witness vote!

https://steemit.com/~witnesses

Thanks everyone for reading my witness report!