[Announcement] The Steem curation extension has been updated to highlight promoted posts with all available language settings
Update Announcement
The Steem Curation Extension has been updated again, reviewed by Google, and published in the Chrome Webstore. As-of yesterday, a new version is available for installation and use in any Chromium-based browser (Brave, Chrome, and Edge - among others)
You can install the extension from here and you can review the source code here.
What's new in this update?
- Promoted post highlighting is now available for all supported languages, not just English.
- The extension now installs on Linux
- The included chart.js library was updated to v4.4.9
- Some unneeded error logging was downgraded to log level
Background and Purpose
People who have been here for long enough will remember that the initial reason for creating this extension was to provide visual highlighting of posts for authors who make use of the blockchain's /promoted mechanism and for authors who set @null beneficiary settings.
This added visibility lets curators give special attention to the authors who are fighting inflation by burning STEEM or SBD.
At present, without a tool like this, there is no easy way for most curators to find and reward the authors who are helping to limit the blockchain's inflation by burning tokens, so there is no meaningful incentive for authors to burn tokens in exchange for post visibility.
This was the initial problem that the Steem Curation Extension was intended to solve. Over time, additional features have emerged, but post highlighting for Visibility as a Service continues to be the core functionality.
A couple weeks ago, however, @o1eh posted the article Content Promotion 📢 which brought to my attention that the /promoted post highlighting was not working with the Ukrainian language settings. Additionally, @michelangelo3 brought to my attention that installation from the Chrome Webstore wasn't working with Linux. So, I fixed both of those problems in a new version, v0.5.1-beta, and submitted the updated package to the Chrome webstore for review.
In this latest version, all of Steemit's supported languages should get the correct highlighting for promoted posts. (Languages include: English, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Ukrainian.)
Yesterday, the review was completed by Google and the new version was published.
Key Features of the Extension
Posts with @null beneficiaries in a feed
For anyone who hasn't been around since the first version was published on github, here's a complete-ish summary of the capabilities that the Steem Curation Extension gives to the curator upon visiting Steemit or other condenser-based web sites.
| Number | Description |
|---|---|
| 1 | /Promoted posts are highlighted in shades of blue. The higher the promotion amount, the darker the blue. This doesn't just happen on the /promoted page, but it happens wherever a post appears in a feed (until the post pays out). |
| 2 | Posts with @null beneficiary settings are highlighted in shades of red or orange. The shade of the highlighting also reflects the size of the beneficiary setting. |
| 3 | Posts that are promoted and have @null beneficiaries are also highlighted in a dark shade of blue. |
/promoted post highlighting and curator's overlay
| Number | Description |
|---|---|
| 4 | If you click on the post's payout element, it shows you how many different accounts have promoted a post (thanks to code by @moecki). |
| 5 | Visibility of resteems can be toggled on and off in any account's feed, and also in any account's blog page. |
| 6 | There is a curator overlay that appears on each post with information about the post, the author, the author's follower network, and a variety of other information. (Unfortunately, this always shows in English. It doesn't inherit the language setting from Steemit.) |
| 7 | If you click into a post, it shows you the word count and reading time. |
| 8 | If you click on the voter list inside a post, it gives you some extended voting information about the top voters. |
Extended voting information and clickable list of resteemers
| Number | Description |
|---|---|
| 9 | A list of all resteemers is available inside the post. |
| 10 | Graphs of voting and payout history are provided. (@cmp2020 wrote most of the code for items 7-10 with some debugging assistance from me.) |
| 11 | If you click on your "Profile icon", it will show your remaining voting percentage. (@moecki and I both worked on this) |
Post and payout visualizations
So, this is an invitation for people to try the extension out (regardless of the language you use).
You can download the browser extension, here
Once installed and activated, you can see it in action by visiting any of the following sites:
If you use this extension, you're giving authors a reason to burn tokens to promote their posts, which could help the entire ecosystem. You're also getting some other potentially useful information that wouldn't be available without it (personally, after growing accustomed to running the extension, Steemit feels sort-of "incomplete" when it's turned off.)
Developer contributions are also welcome. If you are a developer and you have ideas that would improve it. Please feel free to contribute!
Please try it out and let me know about your experience and your suggestions for improvement.
Thank you for your time and attention.
As a general rule, I up-vote comments that demonstrate "proof of reading".
Steve Palmer is an IT professional with three decades of professional experience in data communications and information systems. He holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics, a master's degree in computer science, and a master's degree in information systems and technology management. He has been awarded 3 US patents.
Pixabay license, source
Reminder
Visit the /promoted page and #burnsteem25 to support the inflation-fighters who are helping to enable decentralized regulation of Steem token supply growth.