EDIT

It seems that steemd.steemit.com is down again, it was only on for a few hours. What are is @steemitdev doing? Frustrating for many this is.

Continue with original post...

In a surprise move it seems that Steemit Inc. has put their recently decommissioned WebSocket URI back online, fixing FOSSbot Voter's connection to the blockchain, and no doubt many other APIs, libraries and apps.

Don't believe me? Go to the websocket.org echo test, type in wss://steemd.steemit.com and try talking to it. It works, at least at the time of writing.

It doesn't look like they announced this so I'm calling it, I'm breaking the story 🤓 Hopefully it wasn't a wrong button press, hopefully it stays up until those who maintain the essential libraries (cough cough steem-js) can have enough time to make the required updates.

So wait, FOSSbot is fixed?

EDIT: FOSSbot is a free open source software voter bot for Steemit, check it out here.

Not exactly. The voter bot still depends on steem-js which is part way through updating from using the old WebSocket way to connect to the blockchain to the (not so new) RPC way. They are fundamentally different and need different code to run, so it's not as simple as changing a URI.

But it works for now. 🚀

While I have you attention...

I've started back working on FOSSbot Voter this week and I'm hoping to get critical fixes out first and then a stable v0.3 release. I know I know, you've heard it before, but if you have a little patience you will be rewarded. There haven't been any significant contributions yet, except on the ideas front, so it's pretty much been a one man show. I'm doing my best.

It's great to see so many people using the software, we have nearly 100 forks to date!

Image is original and under no license, i.e. CC0. #slothicorn for the win 😎

More interesting stuff coming soon 😉