Steemit - Filtering Posts by Authors and Tags
My journey on Steemit began, and I'm slowly discovering what features are available on the platform, as well as the ones that aren't.
In my search for good reads, I've found authors who write about topics that interest me, while also writing and resteeming a lot of content that I'm not interested in. Since the posts that interest me use specific tags, I wished for a way to find only the posts from authors that I like, and filter them by tags. When we visit, for example, the URL for the "steem" tag:
https://steemit.com/trending/steem
Posts tagged "steem" from several authors will appear, without the option to narrow the list down to posts from specific authors, like for example, the official Steemit blog.
After searching a bit about the issue at hand, I found out that (at least at the moment of this writing) an option to filter posts by authors and tags simultaneously does not exist on Steemit (yet?). Thankfully, there's a third-party tool that does exactly that. It's a site called Steem Tag Search, created by @kasperfred:
https://steem.kasperfred.com/tagsearch/
The tool is open source, and its code is available on Github.
Usage
There are two ways to use the tool:
One way is by going to the site and filling in the forms with the usernames of one or more authors without the at (@) sign - and separated by spaces -, one or more tags also separated by spaces (actually, the tags field may also be left blank, but I'll get to this later*), then pressing the search button.
The other way is by writing the search parameters directly into the URL, although if filtering by multiple authors or tags, the spaces that separate them must be replaced by the plus (+) sign.
Example with only one tag and one author. To display posts tagged with "roadmap2018" by @steemitblog (the official Steemit blog):
https://steem.kasperfred.com/tagsearch/?authors=steemitblog&tags=roadmap2018
An example with more than one tag (note the plus sign separating the tags). Posts tagged with both "steemit" and "roadmap" by @steemitblog:
https://steem.kasperfred.com/tagsearch/?authors=steemitblog&tags=steemit+roadmap
Now an example with more than one author. To display posts tagged with "witness-category" by the users @someguy123 and @prc, to view only posts related to their work as witnesses:
https://steem.kasperfred.com/tagsearch/?authors=someguy123+prc&tags=witness-category
The good thing about these URLs is that we can add them to our browser's bookmarks and access them whenever we want, which allows us to track our favorite combinations of authors & tags and avoid clutter.
Other Things I've Noticed
* Specifying authors without specifying any tag leads to a page that lists all the tags used by the chosen authors, and clicking a tag displays the posts with that tag (though this page only allows choosing one tag at a time). But the opposite (only specifying tags and no authors) doesn't work. I wanted to view all the posts tagged with "steemit" and "pt" (to show only posts written in Portuguese) but it didn't work. When I filled in the tags without specifying any author, the server returned an HTTP 500 error. But again, I think it makes sense that this doesn't work, as there would be too many results to pull at once!
Conclusion
Even though the tool doesn't do everything I want, it is of great help to filter posts from the authors I like and only with tags that interest me. It would be great if these features were officially implemented in Steemit. Filtering posts by combinations of authors and tags would make it easier to find posts about specific subjects written by specific authors, while filtering by multiple tags (without the need to specify the author) would make content discovery easier on the site in general. Steemit is still in beta and a lot can change and improve over time, so for now we'll have to wait.