Witness Update - Geoffrey - August Week 3
Thanks for checking out my first witness update! If you haven't seen it yet, my original witness petition post is available here. Since then, I've done a bit more to support the Steemit community:
- Wrote some how-to posts[1],[2],[3].
- Hung around steemit.chat, where I mostly helped people set up miners, witnesses, seed-nodes, or just navigate the website.
- Created another open-source app to enhance the Steemit user experience[4].
- Copy edited someone's article that went on to earn ~$2000.
- Upgraded my seed and witness to v0.13.0 without missing any blocks (not much of an achievement, really, more compulsory).
- Created a metadata redirection method, and forward through my seed's website, such that visiting
http://seed.zapto.org/usernamewill redirect to the url set in username's metadata[5]. - I bought a lot of SBD on polo, and when the exchange rate has been favorable I've been trading it for Steem and powering up.
In other news, my seed-node was having problems with getting stuck, so I doubled the cpus and ram and it hasn't had any downtime since. This has also enabled me to run the account_history plugin, which was necessary for [4] to work.
Going forward, I have improvements in mind for [6], my original Steem app. I've been taking the time to look through the code for Steem and Steemit.com to see how to extract information from the blockchain, and so I intend to transition [6] to use the full account history for an account to get a longer term estimate of the curation rewards. This is similar to how [4] works, though iterating through the get_account_history() results in slower page loads. To resolve this, I'm looking into dynamically updating the page, instead of just rendering the results after it fully computes them. I already cache the results and only update them once a day, but the first load can be too long for some older accounts.
Finally, I'm considering making a script to automate the process of generating and setting an owner, active, posting, and memo key for the miners listed in a config.ini file. The default isn't very secure, since mining an account sets the same key for all four access levels, which also prevents the mined user from logging into steemit.com.
The code for my seed-node website, [4], [5], and [6] are available here.
Well, that's it for this week! If you like what I'm doing, I encourage you to vote for me as a write-in candidate on /~witnesses. Let me know if you have any questions, or need any help!
Top: A picture I took of the entrance to the Regal theatre from the balcony of the AMC theatre across the street, Times Square, NY