mistakes were made...

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Introduction to Newbie Blog

Since this is a first in a series, a brief introduction is in order. The goal of this Blog Series is to provide some helpful information to the many new Steemians that are sure to come after me.

One of my favorite "demotivational" posters is a picture of a sinking ship with the caption: Have you ever considered that your purpose in life is to serve as a negative example for others?

That is my goal for this Blog. Let me mess up for you. Newbies like myself can hopefully read about my misteps and misadventures and have a chuckle, while also getting tips on how to better navigate the steemit world.

Hopefully as I get set up and live through my mistakes, I'll add some vblogs to the series.

I am technically proficient (see my Intro Blog), but completely new to cryptocurrency, blockchain, steemit, etc. This means I will figure things out. I will make mistakes along the way. I will be happy to share my many mistakes and golden nuggets found along the way.

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My top 5 lessons I learned this week while getting started in Steemit

I felt kind of like a blind cat in a china shop, except for the wonderful Welcome Page. Be sure to read the helpful articles section, which in invaluable. But of course, no amount of help can prevent me from stumbling through some things....

Lesson #1 getting set up in Steemit: usernames are forever!

Now, this might sound obvious to you dear reader, but I was so excited to set up my account, that I thought the userid I was being asked for was for internal account use, not something the whole world would see. A little googling found that I was not alone in this, and some steemians ended up with some VERY unfortunate usernames.

I know I am bringing my friends over to Steemit as fast as I can, and hopefully you are as well. So be sure to tell them this handy bit of info before they type something about a leather fetish or worse in as a private joke, because the joke will be on them.

When users asked about this after the fact, the response is "well, its Blockchain, so you are stuck with it forever, unless you create a new account." Now, I did give serious thought to doing this, but well, I had just spent hours crafting my first ever blog post, and was comforted that at least I was not walking around on here with babyspankmonkey or something like that. Anyway, if it is too late for you, Tell Your Friends

Lesson #2 getting set up in Steemit: Markup and Image hosting

Now, I must admit that I was a little concerned with having to use markup, as I have always had friendly blog software to coddle and spoil me. But honestly after reading the link in the welcome page on markup, I was off and running. That is not to say that I don't still have a lot to learn. I'm going to start looking at some blog post for design ideas as well as content I think.

Another thing that was weird to me was having to provide a URL to an image in markup. I found that there are several sites that let you easily upload images, and then provide you the links to reference in your markup draft.

Now I don't know enough to make solid recommendations, but I can tell you I tried imgsafe and had problems with it. I then tried postimg and this has so far been working for me. One interesting thing here, is I did not even create an account. I simply uploaded my picture and got the link. According to the site, they image will stay there till I delete it. I also used this site for my 'cover' and 'profile' pictures (found in settings, which leads me to my next mistake:

Suffice to say that my pictures looked like they were set up my a drunk one-handed chimp. It took me a minute to figure out that "Cover" was kind of a bar across the top of your page, and 'profile' was the small circular picture at the top right of your screen.

These are images that you just past a URL into a field. There is no tools for sizing, aligning, etc. I looked around and found that the Profile picture is best when it is formatted to 400X400, or 800x800. Mine is still not the perfect picture as I am too far off center for this tiny circle. Probably need to find a picture where your face (or other image) is right in the middle.

For the 'cover' image, you want to edit your picture to be 1354 x 155 pixels to work best with this masking. I need to find a better picture for this as I originally had my face, and the masking just looked like I was a creep peeking into your computer.

Lesson #3 getting set up in Steemit: Replying to comments and 'bots'

One of the first things I read about steemit is community and authenticity are important. One of the ways to foster community is to respond to comments. I was very excited to find that several people had replied to my first blog post almost instantly. Wow, what a great community. I dutifully replied to each comment (there were not many), although I could tell that some appear to be more of an offer that a genuine interaction with me or my content. It was not until after I started looking for other interesting posts to comment and upvote (both important), that I found the exact same posts on these blogs as well. Now I'm guessing we are all pressed for time, and that it probably is not necessary to answer each bot with a kind response.

Lesson #4 getting set up in Steemit: Buying steem

OK, so this one really shows what a noob I really am. As of today, I owned exactly '0' crypto currency of any type.

I probably should have read this helpful articlebefore trying on my own, but here was my bumbling attempt at this:

So I click on the righthand menu in steemit and follow the link that says 'Buy Steem' thinking, wow, that was easy. But then this just takes me to 'Blocktrade' which is a great site, but it only lets you buy crypto with some other crypto. Several of the articles I found just assumed I already had a digital wallet out there somewhere with some digital cash in it.

But no, I had to go and try to find out how to do this, and my guess is I got screwed. So I did some searching (not shopping) and went to coinbase. As I test I just wanted to buy 10 dollars of something that I could turn into Steem (some of you already see where this is going, right?).

Anyway I bought 10 USD worth of BTC. After the service charge, I had 8.40 USD worth of BTC. Then I got a link from Blocktrade to transfer this into to get my Steem Power (more on this in another post). Well, after some additional fees for this transfer, I ended up getting 3.14 USD worth of Steem Power. Ouch

Suffice to say I'll go broke doing this. Now I have not shopped around, and I have not yet looked to see of this giant cost was due to my tiny amount of initial purchase. (Will follow up in another Blog post). So dear friends, once again, let me serve as an example of what NOT to do.

Lesson #5 getting set up in Steemit: Finding help

Some of my mistakes come from not asking. In my very brief experience here, I get the distinct impression that this community WANTS this community to succeed more that any other I have seen. It is partly the great folks here, and partly the genius of the Steem model. You can be actually rewarded financially by helping the community and the project to grow and develop.

Starting tomorrow, I'm going to explore the Discord channels, the Steemit Chat, and any other places that us newbies can and should hang out to get educated, and to learn from the wisdom of the community.

Until next time,

If you can Dream it, you can Steem it.

@phaazer1 [SquareLink]