G'day Team,

While I've been on Steem for around six months now, I'm only starting to get to grips with the plethora of useful tools and interesting projects that the community has to offer. While I rarely make this sort of post I wanted to highlight a few of the projects and tools I've stumbled across recently and give them a bit of a shout out!

SteemAuto

SteemAuto is my new favorite way to be lazy! It's a tool that allows you to create or follow curation trails, cast auto-votes, and even time your posts without having to come online. It's a simple concept but one that has the potential to save anyone plenty of time.

For example, I have a bad habit of not checking my feed, so people whose articles I love to read might take me between a day to a week to finally get around to voting on. With SteemAuto those days are in the passed. SteemAuto allows me to create a list of accounts that I'd like to vote on and every time they create a post the tool does the rest. You can also follow curation trails, where you select to mimic the vote of another selected account (like @steemstem).

---

---

Finally, SteemAuto has another really nifty tool which helps anyone (like me) who tends to be posting in the middle of the night for the rest of the world. Scheduled posts mean this is now a problem of the past. All you have to do is cut-and-paste your text and set a time and date! Such a simple concept, but so useful!

Steem Assistant

On the theme of being lazy... if you can't be bothered to filter through good and 'questionable' science content, if you can't keep track of users with a less-than-stellar reputation and if you really just want a easy well to tell if you're wasting your vote... give the new SteemSTEM Steem Assistant a go! The handy little chrome tool put together by @mobbs colour-codes profiles according to their reputation as judged by the steemstem curation team.

Red is bad, grey is questionable and white is... well normal. There's also a green catagory for special members of the steamstem community, with as-yet-unspecified importance.

---

---

Steem Basic Income (SBI)

SBI (run by the team at @steembasicincome) is an interesting little social experiment that's been gaining a decent amount of popularity recently. The concept is that members buy 'shares' (with Steem) in a central fund which re-distributes these 'shares' as votes. The twist here is that for each share you buy, you have to nominate a friend who also gets a share. This promotes the creation of contests and other community-interaction projects which really promotes the social nature of Steem.

While it's still in its early days and has a long way to go to 'prove itself', I think the concept is one that should be applauded and so far the execution is both transparent and user-friendly. For me, it's worth giving a chance, and I think I'll probably buy about 50 shares (that's 50 steem worth) over the next few months.

For those who've been paying attention, this also means I'll need to nominate fellow steemians. I'll probably just be picking people who're active on my posts, but who knows, maybe I'll be one of those folks who starts running competitions :P.

Check out their page here and feel free to give us your views.

Steem Monsters

It was only a matter of time before someone decided to make a card game on the steem platform, and so far I think they've really nailed it. As a bit of a nerd-at-heart, I jumped on this idea as soon as I saw it and am now the proud owner of quite a few of these cards.

I'm hoping the concept expands to include tournaments and battles soon, though I won't be surprised if it takes a while to smooth out all the wrinkles. On a larger scale, it'll be really interesting to see if the game brings more people to steem or if it simply draws people from the existing community. I'll also be interested to see if it takes off like cryptokitties and starts making some people lots and lots of $$$.

Regardless of the direction it takes, Steem Monsters is a valiant effort to do something new and refreshing within the community!

This post wouldn't be over without me showing off my collection, so here it is!

---

My Collection of Epic Monsters

---

Steem Reports

Now I'm well aware that almost everyone knows about this tool, but it's a new discovery to me. Steem Reports is pretty much a pair of binoculars combined with a magnifying glass, allowing you to both stalk and scrutinize steem accounts.

For examples these are my largest supporters in the last 31 days...

---

My voters in the last 31 days

---

The tool has a plethora of reports it can run from voting to flagging to a breakdown of who's voting for which of your articles. Perhaps my favourite tools, however, is this network graph, which shows who's voting for who in your network. As you can see, I owe some votes to @shaka, @geekgirl and @bue!

---

---

This Sick Banana Bread Recipe

Absolutely not related to steem at all! But a great recipe from COOKIE + kate! Here's my girlfriend's version :)

---

Thanks

Thanks for reading team and feel free to give any feedback. I'm always on the lookout for interesting new tools, communities and projects so if you're aware of anything interesting give me a heads up in the comments section!

Thanks team

-tfc

---

steemstem

Get involved today!