Hello and welcome! Thanks for the excellent and detailed background story. Is your son still in your life? I hope he is. Any commercials or other works we could look up to see you in?

Webpages

There are a ton of other webpages to help you with Steemit. Here are some of the best for beginners:

https://steemd.com/ (This site is used to keep track of your voting power and other stats. You do not want to run out of voting power, and you only get so much per day. I keep my voting power around 80% for example.)

https://steem.makerwannabe.com/ (This site will tell you who follows you, who unfollows you, and who mutes you. It is great for meeting new people too. I regularly check it to see who has followed me to see if I should follow them back.)

https://steemit.chat/ (This site is the official chat webpage for Steemit. There are Discord channels too, but I usually stick to the official site. Come in to network and meet new friends. You can directly message people there too, so it makes it easier to communicate with your closest friends.)

Bots

Oh yeah, there are a lot of bots on here. If you see a cookie cutter reply, especially to your intro post, it is almost certainly a bot. Check the account's reputation. If it is low, I would recommend just ignoring them. Everything is public on Steemit, so you can go look at an account's comments and replies. Are they all the same? It's a bot.

Sourcing and Adding Photos

Adding photos to your account as a new Steemian may be confusing at first too. The easiest way it to click to "Submit a Story." Once in there, use the built in Steemit tool to upload an image from your computer. Below the posting window, you will see "Insert images by dragging & dropping, pasting from the clipboard, or by selecting them." Click on the blue text. Once the image is uploaded, you can copy and paste the link into your account settings.

Here's a link to a Google Document I made to help with the coding:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NlAoGnP8q7ZAxGsEnvza-qotUGkoaae4SwXdubAhi2g/edit?usp=sharing

Account Verification

Verifying your identity is very important because it will get you more support and people will trust you more. The best way to verify is to link back to your Steemit account by using another public social media account. For example, I posted my Steemit articles from here through my Twitter account. Another person posted their Steemit information on their Facebook account. Some people will even post a video of themselves writing out their account information since that cannot be Photoshopped. The more famous a person is or the more valuable their content is, the more important it is that they verify. If a new account falls within those two categories and fails to verify, it may get blacklisted.

Security

Do not use your owner key to log into Steemit.com to post. Use your private posting key instead. Keep your owner key offline as much as possible, and only use it when you must.

Per the advice given by Arcanage, you should only use your owner key to:

1. Recover your account.
2. Change the other keys.
3. Give a present to your children a few minutes before dying.

A lot of scams have been happening on Steemit recently. If you click a link to a site that prompts you to log into it, be extra careful. Double and triple check the address to make sure it is really steemit.com. A recent scam was using "lsteemit" as the domain name, and people were entering their owner keys to log into it. That allowed the scammers to take those user's accounts, empty the money from them, and then ruin their reputation by using the newly hacked accounts to further the scam.

If you find or suspect a scam, please report it in the #steemitabuse channel on steemit.chat.

Glitches

Steemit is having issues lately. Make sure you are copying and pasting your post content often as you write it, and put the data into another document to avoid losing it. I'll copy and paste my content into a Google document as just one example. Some people use Markup editors to do the same.

Definitely keep a backup copy right before you post it too, for some people have come back the next day to see half the post missing or the entire post missing even though the day before it appeared to have posted successfully. Make sure you copy and paste your replies too before you post them. They can vanish immediately after clicking to post them.

New follows are being reversed as well. If someone follows you and you see them unfollow you, check with them before you think they unfollowed you on purpose. A lot of times, these days especially, they did not mean to unfollow you. After posting this reply, I will follow you. If for some reason it shows that I did not, please let me know.

Again, welcome! If you have any questions about getting started, look me up on the chat site or reply to this post.