New Browser Extension: Get Stats About Your Followers On The Steem Blockchain

Presenting a new open-source browser extension for Firefox and Chrome that will allow you to get statistics about your (or anyone's) followers on the Steem blockchain. The extension can be sourced from the Firefox addons store here and the Google Chrome store here.

Repositories

Google Chrome extension repository can be found at - https://github.com/revo-lutionist/steemfollower_chrome
Mozilla Firefox extension repository can be found at - https://github.com/revo-lutionist/steemfollower_firefox

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Introduction

This blog post serves as an introduction to a new browser extension that I have developed for the steem blockchain. This is an open source project with code being hosted at github (links above). Development is in beta stages, with a limited set of statistics being available. Developers are encouraged to add potential statistics to the extension. Below are descriptions of how the extension works, including a video and screenshots. Ideas for further feature development are presented.

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The Extension

SteemFollower is an extension that allows the user to get statistics regarding their (or anyone's) followers on the steem blockchain. It remains inactive on all websites, but becomes active and useable on steemit.com or steempeak.com user blogs (e.g. steemit.com/@revo). The statistics generated will be for the followers of the blogger's page you are on. When the extension icon is clicked a new tab will open to display the stats. This will take a few moments for the data to be retrieved from the blockchain.

At present there are three main statistics generated, within a couple of subcategories. To the best of my knowledge these statistics aren't available from the other steem resources out there. The idea for this grew out of my own curiosity as to how many of my followers were still active on the steem blockchain, and what their reputation and SP distributions were. So to test this, the statistics generated are:

Follower Activity

This stat measures follower activity based on their last posting activity (both blog posts and comments) on the blockchain. The more active categories are posting in the last week, or posting in the last month (excluding the last week). As you can see above from my followers' statistics, over half of my followers haven't posted in the last month. Mousing over each bar of data in the chart pops up a tool-tip with the actual number of followers and the number of followers as a percentage of the total followers. Please note that there is an error in the percentage calculation of the 'Less Active' data, and it always displays as 100%. I suspect this is one of those programming errors that is so simple as to totally evade my inquiries into what exactly it is. ;) Hopefully soon it will make itself apparent to me and it will be a quick fix.

Follower Reputation Distribution

This statistic measures the reputation distribution of your followers. It is broken into two categories: All followers; and followers active in the last month. Looking at my statistics above, it is pleasing to note that the reputations of my active followers are generally higher than those of the rest of my followers.

Steem Power Distribution

This statistic measures the distribution of the Steem Power of my followers, and is subdivided by the same fashion as described for reputation distribution above. Again it is pleasing to note that my active followers have higher Steem Power on average than the rest of my followers.

The statistics generated by this extension require two detailed blockchain operations (getFollowersAsync, and getAccountsAsync), and as such can take some time depending on how many followers you have. I have about 800 followers, and it takes a few seconds to generate. If you have significantly more followers, it will take longer. Also note that because this relies on the blockchain, as with steemit.com and the other front-ends, things do slow down from time to time. Sometimes patience will be required, or perhaps a reload.

The following short video shows the extension in operation on the Firefox browser.

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Future Development

• Possible addition of new statistics
  • Consider, though, that getting stats on large numbers of followers is time intensive and relies on the stability of the blockchain
• More refined display of the statistics
  • Including possible integration of steemit.com/steempeak.com dark themes to stats display
  • I'm primarily a coder, with design not being one of my strong suits. Opportunities exist for other coders to contribute to this project by prettying up the statistics display.
  • These statistics are currently presented using standard javascript and CSS. Unfortunately there isn't an easy way to generate charts in the web page world. There is potential for the use of charting frameworks here, which while bulky, have done all the hard work in coding for presentation.
• There are no time frames for these future developments, as they will rely on feedback and suggestions from users, and input from other more capable design-oriented programmers.
• Possible integration with my other extensions (steemfeed and steemography)

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Resources

• Firefox extension - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/steemfollowers/
• Google Chrome extension - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/steemfollowers/lffajppopjomglabfckgobachpncppkb
• Github code repositories - https://github.com/revo-lutionist/steemfollower_firefox and
  https://github.com/revo-lutionist/steemfollower_chrome

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Conclusion

A new browser extension for Firefox and Chrome has been presented which retrieves and displays blockchain statistics about your (or anyone's) followers on the steem blockchain. There are some opportunities for future development by myself and/or other open source contributors.

A note about my growing collection of browser extension developments: As mentioned above, I have two other browser extensions (steemfeed and steemography) which interact with the blockchain via either steemit.com or steempeak.com steem user blogs. In addition to these I also have another extension (steemVP) that is active whenever your web browser is open, and it tells you your (or any user's) current steem voting power and value at variable vote strengths. Moving into the future I will be looking at ways to combine some (or all) aspects of these various extensions into a single extension. User feedback will be helpful in determining what should be in and what should be out.