I've had a crazy busy time since making this post, the latest bit of disruption was the installation of the amdgpu driver left me high and dry with no computer to access the internet with for 24 hours.

After @xeroc told me there is a load-balanced network of RPC endpoints, it occurred to me that in fact I was free to switch my platform to a much wider range of possible platforms, for example, a favourite of mine, Vala. But circumstance has conspired repeatedly now to push me towards Python, and even with access to RPC endpoints, I don't get the benefit of a complete friendly API that hides the complicated parts of setting up these RPC connections. This would end up being a lot of unproductive work and probably at least for some time yet, would not be used by anyone.

I am dog tired at the moment, so I'm not going to do anything this evening, but I think my next post on this subject will be about how to set the RPC to use the https://steem.ws/ endpoints. According to that site, the connection string is wss://node.steem.ws - the default in piston is (I guess with the URL prefix added): wss://this.piston.rocks

Anyway, so hopefully I will be posting more posts like this in the future really soon, every time I figure out something not as yet documented.