Hey guys. Let's have coffee together and talk about our steemit experience. I sort of want this post to be a modest tribute to @hrissm who took a lot of time and effort introducing the stubborn and impatient me to the platform and hopefully now I also can share some tips to show 4,7% of how much I appreciate his help, support and friendship. Thank you!
It's been 3,5 months since I joined the beautiful steemit community and ever since then I've been looking for tools, tips and ideas to make my life here easier, since it's very difficult in the beginning to grasp the ideas behind the blockchain for the first time for a complete noob.
It also gets annoying at times, when you compare it to a blogging service you may have been accustomed to. You not only have to understand the blockchain technology, ancap ideology, the rules each subcommunity sets for themselves if you are willing to accept their support, but also various nuances related to the cryptocurrency itself, your place in the platform and... well, how to use it on a regular basis. Because let's be honest - you don't really need to know all that to start publishing posts, but you will absolutely need to know what voting power is, how to redeem rewards, what your posts look like, how to make them look a certain way, and eventually how to get the most of steemit for your own development.
See below for a list of apps, websites and tools which will help you on your way through steemit, according to me. I use steemit both on my computer and on my phone, so the list will incorporate both.
Steem Writer: https://steemwriter.learnthis.ca/
Right now I'm writing this post on my laptop using this app and I'm extremely satisfied with the way it works. It allows you to write posts with preview on the side and save as many drafts as you wish. As you may know, the steemit website saves a draft of what you're writing as you go (only one draft, in the post window), but when you want to start multiple posts at the same time you may need to use a text editor on your pc or a different app, such as streemian, which doesn't really do the job for me: I don't like the interface, it's too complicated, messes up the tags and I feel like it's not fully me-friendly. However, I'm going to mention it below for a different reason.
When it comes to preview on the side, I used to use the Steemitmoreinfo plugin for Chrome (and I still sometimes do, as it has some fun options, for example shows the value of each upvote you receive and some additional stats), but it seems to sometimes mess up the interface, eats the post title and I realized I have to turn it off way too often.
SteemD https://steemd.com/@yourusername
A very obvious choice: SteemD allows you to check your (or someone else's) activity history, the bandwidth, voting power, reputation and more as you're advancing on the platform.
SteemNow https://steemnow.com/@yourusername
Another staple one - SteemNow was actually my first website related to steemit that I was introduced to (thank you @hrissm!). It will basically display your current rewards as you go and how much your upvote is worth with your current voting power. You can also calculate how much sp you need for your upvote to be worth a certain amount. A very useful tool.
SteemStats https://steemstats.com/
For more detailed statistics and easy sorting I would suggest that you visit SteemStats. The colors make it very easy to browse through. I was recently calculating the percentage of bought vs. earned SP and this website was very helpful.
Steem Basic Income https://steemit.com/@steembasicincome
Alright, I know there are many controversies revolving around using upvote bots. However, I believe they are a good way to reward someone who does a good job posting quality content and I will continue to use them for this purpose. Steembasicincome works two-fold: you suggest a user to them, who will be receiving "basic income", depending on the frequency of their posting, but simultaneously, you are subscribed as well. This way it rewards you for curating and supporting good content. For me the upvotes oscillate between $0.05-$0.10 and I think it's a nice gift you can give someone who you think does a good job but is often unnoticed, and you yourself can't give them as much as you wish you could.
Steepshot https://steepshot.io/
Alright, as much as I don't like steepshot, I also kind of do. For people who post mainly photography, it's the go-to tool. It's basically an iphone and android "instagram" app for the steem blockchain. It is very underworked yet though: there are no editing options and it's very delayed, but on the other hand it's very to the point and allows you to use more than 5 tags. I still use it despite the things I don't like about it, which may or may not mean it's a good app regardless. ;) Good and admirable thing is, it's constantly developing!
Streemian
As I mentioned before, if you need to schedule a post, because say you're going on vacation and you don't wanna deal with steemit, you can use Streemian. I believe I used it twice and the story ended after I realized it messes up my tags by adding apostrophes. This may be fixed by now (I don't know) but I still refrain from using it, however, I would use it again if I needed to schedule posts, but I would check and edit them from my phone if needed.
Steemify
Last, but not least - Steemify is a must for every steemit user. It's a very simplistic app showing you two kinds of notifications:
- activity on your posts and account: comments or upvotes, mentions, new followers, unfollows etc.
- activity of selected users: new posts, comments received, etc.
Steemify is great, as it simplifies life a lot. Especially that I don't really like busy or sites of such kind - it reminds me too much of facebook and I just like the natural interface of steemit more. Steemify allows you to access steemit through the app - I know some people do that and the only drawback is the lack of a "back" button. I however just use it to get the notification and go to steemit through my browser to view it.
So there we go - my list of 8 most used apps/websites/tools for Steemit. Let me know if you are already using something good or better that you would recommend to me. Thanks for your time!