What is steemit, and why would I want to publish blog posts on it?

Paraphrased from the FAQ, steemit.com is a website powered by the steem blockchain and the steem cryptocurrency. All content is stored on the steem blockchain. Content contributors, such as blog post and comment authors, are rewarded with steem-based currency when their content is upvoted.

For me personally, the blogging part of steemit.com looks like an interesting experiment. I have never seriously monetised any of my blogs, the two most popular instances being cpbotha.net (18 years old) and vxlabs.com (almost 8 years old), preferring to create interesting content without any advertising whatsoever.

As part of a slightly contradictory experiment, I did add an ethereum address to the vxlabs blog post where I first documented the jaxx cryptocurrency wallet vulnerability I had discovered. Although that post has been read more than 40000 (fourty thousand) times, not a single bit of ethereum was sent to the advertised address.

It looks like on steemit, a different environment is being created, where it is the norm to tip the creators of content that you have found valuable.

What is Emacs, and Orgmode?

Emacs is a 40 year old operating system with built-in editor that is still very much alive and kicking, with a young and vibrant community of open source developers contributing new tricks to it every day.

What makes Emacs so powerful, is that the largest part of the core operating system, I mean editor, itself is written in Emacs-lisp. In this same environment plugins, called packages, are written to extend even further the powers of Emacs.

Orgmode, or your life in plaintext as it's called, is one such package and is considered by many, including me, to be one of the killer applications of Emacs.

Besides for intensive note-taking and task and life management, I also use Emacs Orgmode to write my more involved blog posts and publish them directly to any wordpress instance. See this 2014 post on vxlabs describing the whole process.

One of the many advantages of writing posts in Orgmode, is that you can have one canonical source format for all of your work, and publish to any blogging platform from there.

Getting Emacs Orgmode posts onto steemit, super basic version

This first basic post, actually created merely to test steemit, shows that it's straight-forward converting your Orgmode blog post, via the emacs pandoc integration and M-x org-pandoc-export-to-markdown, into a markdown version that can be copied and pasted into the steemit.com authoring interface.

Below is a screenshot showing my Emacs with the original orgmode on the left, and automatically generated markdown on the right:

I did have to copy and paste the screenshot image into the steem authoring interface, and I also had to convert the generated markdown to long lines. (Why does steemit get confused by hard breaks?)

Next steps would be to make an Emacs package such as org2blog to submit an orgmode post to steemit directly from Emacs, with all conversions automatically done on the way.

Stay tuned folks!