Help Your Readers, Help Yourself - Today's Tip for an "Easy STEEMIT Hack"
Which of the two libraries below would you prefer to use?
On the left, well-organized shelves? Or, on the right, chaotic piles of random books?
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Photos courtesy of Eli Francis, Thomas Kelley, and http://unsplash.com
That's a sort of visual comparison/contrast between "theirs" and "mine" - on the left, my organized Steemit blog, - on the right, the "typical Steemit blog" that you are already so familiar with. If you click on each, (select "open in new window") you can see the difference in detail...
Would you like to make your blog far easier for your readers to access?
Steemit is uniquely wonderful, but thus far, the hard-working developers have had to focus most on core functions. You can give your readers a new "front door" to your blog by creating a nice Table of Contents for their convenience.
How does a Table of Contents help? Consider this:
Have you ever discovered a new Steemit author who looks intriguing? You've maybe read one of their articles that was really good, and so you go to their Steemit Blog to see what else they have to offer. When you get there, though, you have to scroll down and down, looking for - what? It can be hard to tell from the list of titles and icons just what to read next.
If you offer your audience a Table of Contents, they will be able to easily browse your blog at their convenience, perusing topics of particular interest to them.
Here's how to set it up...
- Create a post that contains an organized set of links to your blog. This is your Table of Contents post.
- Go to http://goo.gl and create a "short link" to your Table of Contents post.
- Put the short link in the "WEBSITE" entry of your "Settings" Tab.
- Now visitors to your Steemit blog can find your articles by topic!
- Add Table of Contents entries as you add new posts.
Here's a close-up of the link to my organized Steemit library...
Notice the shortened google link at the bottom, and the emoji arrows I've used to draw attention to it.
Here's an Important Note and option...
Due to the nature of how Steemit posts work, you will have to create a new Table of Contents about once per month. Just copy your old one to a new post and replace the "short link" in your "Settings" Tab with a new one that points to your latest T.O.C.
Alternatively, if you own/control other webspace outside of the Steemit blockchain, you can set up your Table of Contents once and for all, and simply update and expand it as needed.
Bonus Feature - The google URL shortening service enables you to do some statistical tracking - just add .info to the link in a new tab, and you can see how much of the traffic to your blog has used your Table of Contents. For example, open this "extended info link" in a new window to see what I mean: ➡️https://goo.gl/fgH81G.info⬅️
That's Today's Tip for an "Easy STEEMIT Hack" , folks...
By giving your readers an organized interface to your work, you can improve your interaction with them and enable them to more easily refer back to your work and to share it with others. Your readers will thank you!
Keep it real, keep it organized!
My Steemit Blog...
Photo courtesy of Gabriel Ghnassia and http://unsplash.com
Thanks for your time and attention. I'm here on Steemit because of you, my readers. Wouldn't be here if it weren't for you!
This post is intended to count towards @dragosroua's Challenge30.
I have very eclectic interests and hope, over time, to write about all of them.
Did you enjoy this post?
⬇️Please check out @creatr's world - CLICK each of the images below⬇️
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Oh boy! OK - I will focus on getting this idea over to my WordPress site. Thanks so much for this help. I guess I can't RT older posts, so I am bookmarking this one :) Ah! The learning curve....
Yes, there is a bit of a Steemit learning curve. And to be fair to the developers, it is still in "Beta" and not completely settled yet. Nevertheless, I continue to hope and lobby for the restoration of the "Edit" button to all articles regardless of age.
My primary reason for wanting that is the "archival quality" of Steemit - I want my ultimate, editable table of contents to have the same qualities of durability as all the rest of my articles...
You're very welcome for any help you've found here, and best wishes for your Steemit career! :D
my problem is keeping track of what I've written myself. I don't want to repeat past posts on steemit but other than checking back in my blog I have no idea if I posted a story several months ago
Hmmm, yes, can certainly be a problem... :0
With your shortlink, do your statistics show many people actually going to look at past posts? It seems like people are so busy trying to deal with the flow of current posts. I wonder how much people actually go back to look. I don't see much upvoting between the 24-hour and 30-day payout periods, for example.
Hi, @haphazard-hstead, nice to meet you. This is an excellent question!
Unfortunately, the only way to get separate statistics would be to generate individual http://goo.gl links for each of the articles, which has been more trouble than I've cared to take. :( However, informally speaking, I know that having the T.O.C. has enabled people to sample my other writing. In the future, more software tools and interfaces may become available to make this information more accessible.
I agree that - sadly - there is little "ex post facto" voting on the platform at this time. Nevertheless, I personally view my writing as a whole to be a "body of work" that I hope will be durable and that will have ongoing value to the community. The nature and promise of blockchain permanence offers hope of a lasting legacy.
And so, I consider it worth the extra effort to make all of my blog more accessible, monetized or not. In purely "monetary" terms, I suspect there is some value because some people may make a "follow/unfollow" decision based on the overall quality of my work.
I'll leave you with this final observation:
When, in the hoped-for future, Steemit has tens of millions of users, a large number of them may be and see themselves as no more than "readers," here to read and encourage content, and not at all concerned about the $$$ aspect unless incidentally. My ultimate, overriding purpose and hope for being here is that there may be a growing body of people who find personal value in what I write.
#steemit
I go back and forth about the value of past posts, in the long run. Mainly because those past posts can't be edited. So if any links change, if image hosting problems come up, or if information changes, I have no way of updating my posts. An independent website will let me keep my posts up to date. But I can see the value of a Table of Contents, for sure. I probably will put one together. It will help me keep track of my own content, if nothing else, lol. Happy New Year! And here's to lots of great posts for your own Table of Contents in 2017!
Yep, those are all problems with past posts... I guess when it comes to curating my own past posts in that regard, I'll simply re-post any really significant ones with updated links.
I appreciate that you took the time to visit, read, and comment on what I'm doing here! Nice to meet you; I poked around your blog a bit; made me hungry, so I'm following you now... ;)
Yes, it will be interesting to see how Steemit takes to reposting past content. I've seen it do OK here. And certainly, a year from now, folks won't remember much about any specific posts. But the cheetahbot may notice, lol. Thanks for checking out my blog, too. I hope you enjoy my future posts. Maybe you will see a table of contents soon! : )
This post has been ranked within the top 80 most undervalued posts in the second half of Jan 03. We estimate that this post is undervalued by $5.66 as compared to a scenario in which every voter had an equal say.
See the full rankings and details in The Daily Tribune: Jan 03 - Part II. You can also read about some of our methodology, data analysis and technical details in our initial post.
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Thank You for noticing! ;) :)
Thanks for posting this.
I'm trying to find out how to get more the 20 posts from the blockchain.
Once I figure that out I think I can offer a solution.
On my new website I've got the last 20 posts showing up automatically.
I've managed to strip pout resteems and if I can get it got have all of the posts, it would be a trivial thing to get it to sort into categories using the tags (probably).
If anyone has any insight on how to retrieve more than 20 records I'd be very interested to know.
Then.....
what I could do (thinking out loud) is set up a page that anyone could link to and it would show their table of content automatically.
Hey, Trevor,
You're certainly welcome.
As a "dreamer, coder, and writer" myself, I hear what you're "thinking out loud," and would love to if possible collaborate with you on some level to create a utility to do that... Caveat being that I'm not studied up on most of the "modern" web software tools. (I'm a C-programming -- and virtually any kind of ASM -- hack).
If nothing else, I'm happy to swap ideas and be a cheerleader. ;) Also happy to learn a thing or two from you, if you're willing, and maybe attempt a piece of the project?
Very cool. I'm happy to collaborate.
I'm fine writing the code, and hosting the page, that's all easy.
The one piece of the puzzle I'm missing is how to get more than 20 records.
I'm using the STEEMJS API.
If you know of any other way of getting the blockchain data without having to install node.js (I don't control the server), then that would be useful.
I'm also a PHP developer so I might have a look and see if there is a PHP API.
So any info you could point me to which let's me get more than 20 records would be just awesome.
I'll see if I can dig up anything useful, thanks. :)
@creatr amen :)
or just add links of your old posts below your recent post. I learned this from @richman, it's a lot easier to check out what on earth are you posting and what else you posted back then and it doesn't matter if its old cause info may change but for a certain period of time it'll stay a fact and if we write to help pips on something or give advice or just share - then, it's great to have them accessible like you said for them.
Today, I'm present and glad. Happy New Year :)
Happy New Year, and all the best to you, my fine friend! Thanks for your comment!
I shall begin my library! (Good morning)
A very helpful post as always :)
Thanks, Karen! :)
I love those libraries! But I'd definitely have to hire someone to dust....I'm not the dusting fairy....
Good point; I'm noodling the problem of how to automatically update the library each time I add a post. I've been putting off digging into the details of web programming, but this could be a good project for someone.
An automatic table of contents....that would be good so as not to scroll through each person's posting page.....hmmmm...I wonder if that could be done.
It could indeed... I just question whether I'd be the one to do it... ;)
I'm more into "showing the way" than "doing the heavy lifting," so to speak... :)
Yes, you are from the Ideas Department, like me.
Unfortunately, I've often wound up doing the heavy lifting when I discover to my sorrow that nobody else is willing to do it!
Thank you for posting @creatr.
Excellent photographs and post.
Really do wish you would have obtained permission to use the photograph of bleujay's library for public use. :) However if the posting of it does induce others to open a book, then of course....Carry on.
Yes...a helpful post indeed.
Ah, haven't you ever heard this saying?
I only wish I knew to whom to attribute it...
Forgive me? ;)
it's an old Jesuit saying - the order was very strict and getting permission to do something was more difficult than asking forgiveness for going ahead on your own
Ah yes...good one @creatr. Very humourous. Really...do hope that is a picture of a future library for you. Nice....and for bleujay as well....good pick. Cheers.