So...first content post! One of my hobbies is writing fun things in Python and I know Steem has an API, so I wanted to start messing with that as soon as possible. I thought I'd share how to set it up so if anyone else wants to play with it they can.
I'm using win7 but it should be more or less the same for any flavor of windows.
I'm also going to assume you've already got python installed (I'm using Python 3.5.2). If not, you might want to look into something like Anaconda, it will make life easier. Maybe I'll write a post about installing python later on. For now though, onward...
Packages in python are often installed using pip, which will take care of working out any package dependencies for us, and automatically installing them as well, but there's an extra step involved for the steem library because it needs ujson, which has to be compiled. It is possible to compile it on a windows machine, but unless you want to mess around with setting up a compiler, it's probably just easier to use a precompiled binary. Go here and grab the version for your python. So for instance, in my case, it's ujson‑1.35‑cp35‑cp35m‑win_amd64.whl because I'm on python 3.5 (64 bit). Once you've got your ujson package downloaded, open up a command prompt and type:
pip install ujson‑1.35‑cp35‑cp35m‑win_amd64.whl
Of course, replace the ujson filename with the path and name of the version you downloaded.
That should install ujson for you. Once that's done, we can just let pip install the rest of the dependencies for us. Type:
pip install steem
Once that's done you can easily test it by opening an interactive python interpreter by just typing python. Then:
from steem import Steem
s = Steem()
s.get_account('trentie')['sbd_balance']
Yes, I'm poor. Hopefully posts like these will fix that. :D Anyway, hopefully this will get you started on messing with Steem and python. I think I might write a series of articles on writing bots for popular messaging systems too, if there's any interest.