Steem Observatory is now on Github, Open Source under the MIT license

Source code repository: https://github.com/cryptowyrm/steemobservatory

As promised, Steem Observatory is now on Github, Open Source under the MIT license, following my recent Open Source release of Columns for Steem, my multi column Steem client (like Tweetdeck or Mastodon).

Steem Observatory is a small analytics dashboard for Steem written in ClojureScript and Reagent that aims to be very easy to use, not just for power users but for the average user of Steem.

You can view the app in Firefox and Chrome based browsers at: https://crypticwyrm.neocities.org/steemobservatory/

How it works

You can view it as a big website covering the whole screen and showing data in a split view, or you can make the window very narrow and move it to the side like a sidebar to have it open 24/7 on your screen, giving you a live updating view on the current state of your Steem account. The design is responsive so it also works great on mobile phones and all you need to do to switch between the two view modes is to resize the browser window and the app will change live to fit into the space it's given, with a back button in the top left to switch between the list of Steem posts and the detail view.

Clicking on the username displayed at the top lets you change it to display any Steem user in the app, no need to login with your Steem account since all data used in the app is public.

The big green and red circles in front of Steem posts represent articles that can still generate money (green, less than 7 days old) or not (red, older than 7 days). Clicking on the circle shows you interesting data about the votes, with tables and graphs, like which hour of the day had the most votes or which voters added the highest rewards to your article.

Plans for upcoming features

Steem Observatory is already really useful, I use it every day myself to see if any of the articles I write have new comments or votes, and I don't want to add too many features because it's supposed to be easy to use even for people who aren't power users. That's also why there are little text descriptions shown above each statistic to explain what they are and how they can be useful. There are already a myriad of extremely complex and feature rich Steem statistic apps for power users, but Steem Observatory is doing something different here, it's supposed to be more of a dashboard, something you leave open on your screen but just glance at briefly to get the information you need.

There are however still a few things that I want to add, for example instead of just showing you on each post how many votes it received over the last 24 hours, I want to add a graph that shows you based on all the posts you've written which hours of the day were the most successful for you. Same goes for vote rewards, instead of just showing you which Steem users generated the most revenue for each of your posts, there should be an overview that shows you which of your followers have commented, voted and resteemed the most on all of your posts taken together, showing you which are the most active of your followers.

Another nice feature to have is seeing the percentage of your followers that even interact with your posts at all. A lot of people, and that is not just happening on Steem but on social networks in general, only follow you in the hope that you will follow them back, that is so called follower spam. This makes it hard to gauge just how many people you actually reach with your posts, so a simple percentage value shown in the user interface that represents the actual real number of followers is a really nice to have feature that doesn't add any complexity to the user interface.

You are of course as always in my projects encouraged to request features if you have any ideas, just keep in mind that it shouldn't add any more complexity than is necessary unless the feature is so valuable that it's worth paying the price in added complexity. Otherwise this simple little dashboard will turn into yet another full blown statistics app that doesn't add any value to the Steem ecosystem beyond what is already there :)

Rewarding contributors with Utopian

Now that both my Steem apps are Open Source and I was contacted by people from Utopian.io saying that they'd love to support the further development of my projects, you will soon be able to earn Steem by contributing to Columns for Steem and Steem Observatory and helping to make them even better in the months and years to come. I'll write another post about this soon, explaining how it will all work and what contributions I'm looking for. I'm also especially interested in designers helping out with Columns for Steem, I'm a programmer and we should never do design or so the saying goes :)

Since both apps use the same technology (ClojureScript & Reagent) and Google's Material Design, if you want to get started writing code for or improving the design of Columns for Steem but have a hard time figuring out how it works, you could start with Steem Observatory instead. It's less than 500 lines of code and an overall much more simple project, so it's much easier to understand than Columns for Steem, but everything you learn from the Steem Observatory code will help you work on the Columns for Steem code as well.

For a brief introduction to ClojureScript and Reagent, check out my tutorial here and play around with the Lightmod development environment, which is fully self contained so downloading this one cross platform app is all you need to get started. Both my Steem apps have the Nightlight editor integrated, which is basically a web based version of Lightmod made by the same developer, so after playing around with Lightmod you won't have any problem using Nightlight either.

That's actually exactly how I started out, I tried out Lightmod, exported the project which gives you a properly configured project with the Nightlight editor integrated, and that code then eventually turned into Steem Observatory and was quickly followed by my second Steem project, Columns for Steem. Even if you don't want to work on my projects, I suggest checking the technology out. I've been developing websites for about 20 years and ClojureScript & Reagent are by far the most productive tools I've ever come across, it's the single best way to use Facebook's React framework in my opinion.

I will also try to make an extensive video tutorial on how to work on the code and even how to use ClojureScript & Reagent if you've never done so before, so that even more people will be able to contribute. I'm not sure if my slow Chromebook is up for the task of recording video while the ClojureScript development environment runs, but I'll certainly try :)