STEEM Hackahon with @howo - Building a Wordpress plugin, STEEM Tutorial Page and aiming for the Ballmer peak

in #steem7 years ago

As mentioned in my post last week @howo , who is an @utopian-io moderator, and I have had many ideas for Apps we would like to build on the steem blockchain. But while talking about ideas can be fun enough in and off itself, nothing beats getting together to try and turn thoughts into actions! At least when combined with a lot of good food and beer.

Howo steem hackathon french food.jpg
Picture of our Saturday hacking space in @howo's apartment in Paris.

I don't want to do any big announcements of what we've built just yet, but thought I would give you a short overview of what we're looking to build and I would appreciate your ideas as well!

A Wordpress plugin for STEEM.

Our first idea was to build a Wordpress plugin that allows anyone writing a wordpress blog to download it and upload whatever they write to the STEEM Blockchain. We believe that STEEM has many benefits for bloggers and people sharing creative content regardless of them being on steemit.com and so we want to build a convenient tool to bring all the benefits of STEEM anywhere on the web. We intend to go beyond Wordpress and also make it easy for anyone writing articles on LinkedIn, Medium, etc, to also post it on the blockchain.

We have our first prototype finished and are now reaching out to communities we know who have said they would be willing to try it out and provide their feedback. My thought is that by targeting medium-sized existing communities, we can both get the feedback we seek, but also promote STEEM to what I view as the most relevant new early adopters. I.E groups that are large enough to provide value, yet small/medium enough that they are just below the threshold of obtaining a decent income on the platforms that they use.

I'm looking forward to getting their feedback over the course of the week and also see their impressions of STEEM and steemit.

STEEM Tutorial

Another idea we have been talking about for a while was to build a gamified STEEM tutorial for new users. We both think that 2018 will bring a lot of new users to STEEM and steemit and thus it would be nice to have a more fun and elegant way to teach new users the essentials of the Blockchain and also how to get started.

In short, we want a website where people can learn by doing and then provide their feedback in comments on what they find difficult or confusing when getting started on STEEM. My hope is that we can help lower the barrier to entry that people experience when getting started as there just seems to be an endless amount of things to learn in order to be a pro user.

We hit a few obstacles in terms of how we want to implement the tutorial on the blockchain, but at least we have a working website with the fundamentals in place to be built on. I hope we can share some cool updates in not too long.

Passing "the Ballmer peak"

Being a Saturday we couldn't help but treat ourselves! @Howo insisted that there is this thing in programming called "the Ballmer peak", whereby reaching a certain alcohol level our productivity and creativity would both be amazing.

The Ballmer peak of programming steemit.png
Illustration of the Ballmer peak, a joke claiming that coding skills are at their best at a certain alcohol level

If it is true that this peak actually exists, I think it is safe to say that we must have passed over it at some point as our productivity went down quite significantly. At the end of the day, it was mostly just a very fun thing to do. Our WordPress plugin is now being tested and I am very optimistic about what we can do with it. I hope we can have a professional looking app for it ready either later this month or in February that we can start to market towards more bloggers. Thus also marketing STEEM at the same time.

The best thing for me to see though was how two steemians waning to build something to benefit the blockchain we're both now quite invested in can come together and get something done in a weekend. It looks very promising for the blockchain when people with ideas can discuss their ideas and then come up with something to present the overall community.

Looking forward to some exciting times ahead!

Fredrik / @fredrikaa

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Hey man thats AMAZING I love this! steem hackathon!

You will be a stem whale with 1 million dollars worth of steempower this year guaranteed man, you can take that to the bank :D

I love this hackathon idea! I will resteem this so I can get my #teamghana to participate

awesome. 100% upvoted purely for the bread board covered with yummy foods! ok, well maybe because i'm nosey as well as to what you are building! :) sounds super cool! :) i've got a bunch of videos, 3hrs+ on @teamvideo and can make greenscreen videos if you need any help anywhere. cheers!

Thanks a lot!
Once we have the infrastructure in place, it would be great to have an open library for people to submit how they would explain certain aspects of the Blockchain to new users and get upvoted for it. I think getting the users themselves to help improve how we teach would be amazing as an open innovation project to ensure the tutorial covers what different users find confusing or difficult.

I'll have a look at the @teamvideo account. Can I come back to you on steemit.chat or elsewhere later?

sure, check out the playlist over on youtube as well -- https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXyJyah9MOr9P6jceSPtF14c0IZ-z6kTB -- i've got it on skillshare, udemy and dtube too -- i'm on rocket chat (steemit.chat) too as @teamhumble no worries.

Indeed it was lots of fun !

It's definitely very nice to be able to meet and build things together. It would be very cool to try to scale it up and create something like a steem startup weekend where people from all over the world can come to try to make the best of the steem blockchain withing a weekend. With smts coming out soon I can definitely see that happening as the realm of possible applications that can be built on steem will drastically increase.

Side note : If you are interested in beta testing the Wordpress plugin, feel free to come to me or fredrikaa we'll hook you up :)

I am interested in beta testing! Will follow you to see the progress

Thanks for your interest. Contact me on steemit.chat if you need more infos :)

I will do that soon! Keep on!

Cool! I'm excited for the Wordpress plugin. There are so many well-crafted Wordpress blogs out there which don't bring in any revenue. Bringing some income to those creators is the least we can do. I also saw that there is a Wordpress plugin which allows Wordpress to save images on the Steem blockchain, rather than on the website's server, which I found pretty cool.

Technically they are not saved "on the steem blockchain" but rather on steemit's server but still it's pretty cool because you can upload files via your posting key. Definitely a feature that we are going to push with the plugin so even if the wordpress blog dies, everything still lives on steem.

Ah, yeah, that actually makes more sense. Still a very useful feature indeed.

We would be greatly interested in the plugin as it would make the idea for our steem it youth platform a reality. If we could upload there content from our site onto our blog on steemit quick and easy it'd make things easier for us because of some apprehension people have to crypto in general.

I think this is quite big! A wordpress plugin for Steem sounds great and I hope it goes a long way :) It's definitely going to introduce even more people to steemit.
And I think I'll have to experiment with "the Ballmer peak" myself sometime :D

Thank you for the positive comment @trendo ! Yeah I think it can be an ice addition to have.

It's definitely going to introduce even more people to steemit.

This is the bare minimum I hope to achieve :) It's always more motivating to do projects where you know that the worst thing that can happen is brining STEEM in front of more people!

And I think I'll have to experiment with "the Ballmer peak" myself sometime :D

Be careful! It can backfire ^^

Oh, I'll make sure to be extra careful with that :D

The trick is to know when to stop. But when you have cheese beer and sausage, it's hard to stop :p

Cool stuff. Very interested in the gamified Steem tutorial.

That's awesome. I use Wordpress every day. I also know coding is very hard!

It's also hard to wrap your head around the Steem blockchain and the Steemit.com platform.

Kudos for your contribution!

This is awesome, @fredrikaa. Nice initiative. I came around to check for an update on space but ain't a bad idea either. You two working on something for the whole steem blockchain? Great Effort!

It was good fun! I hope we can have something cool to share with the community soon that can help STEEM grow :)
More space stuff is in the loop so stay tuned ;)

Of course...

Hacking you are doing at your hacking space is so delicious 😂😋
Jokes apart
M eagerly waiting for your WordPress plugin. Its definitely a great idea.
Today i wanted to post an article i wrote on WordPress
https://steemit.com/steemstem/@healthblog/sugar-doesn-t-cause-diabetes-obesity-does-know-more-about-diabetes

but simply coping and pasting don't work here specially image doesn't get copied along with text of article.
Looking forward to use your plugin. Good luck for your work 👍 @fredrikaa

Yeah it's quite tricky, this is why we customized a wordpress text -> markdown converter so your posts look almost the same on steemit/budy etc and on your blog :)