Hi Everyone! Great New Exciting things to announce Today! We been very busy the last few weeks working on many projects for Steemit and Steem.

Our Witness Followbtcnews is doing great. Currently sitting at #55. If you like what we've been doing, please vote for us and help us break into the top 50!

As you may or may not know, there are currently only a very few Full RPC nodes for the Steem blockchain.

We currently are operating a Witness and a Seed Node, but have decided that "in for a penny,in for a pound" and it's our duty as a Witness to help as much as possible, and so we have ordered:

a new BIG, RELIABLE server to setup a FULL RPC NODE for public use

The new server specs for RPC node are as follows:

• (DEDI-DE) 256G DDR4 RAM
• 2x480GB SSD
• Xeon E5
• 50TB BW @ 1gbps

It should be ready for public use by Monday or Tuesday next week. At that time we'll make a post and will release the info for devs to start using it! This is coming out of our pockets. We know we have to earn goodwill and trust here. We know we have to work hard. We are... but we can do more. So here we go.

Next, @crimsonclad and I have been building a new website to put some useful tools that we have been building. You can get a small taste of the cool new easy to use, always-reliable and working @ mentions tracker we are building at http://steemistry.com/steemit-mentions-tool/

Go ahead and try it out! It's still in Beta phase (it could look nicer and a few more things,) but we want you guys to go use it and let it help you be a better and more community minded steemian! We also have some other tools in Alpha that we will be releasing soon. ALL of the tools we build and put on our site will always be 100% FREE for ALL Steemians to use

Next, Minnow Support Project just recently started a new group on their discord server for Canadians, it's called msp-canada. So we felt obliged to try to help them get started and delegated 600 SP (mostly from FollowBTCNews, and a bit from Crimsonclad) to them to help them get going. Crim is a senior PALnet moderator, and a Team Canada channel mod, so go say hello to her!

Next, We have ordered some Steemit T-shirts last week and will be getting them within a few days. We plan on giving some out to Steemians next week, so please stay tuned so you can possibly get one.

Finally, Please make sure to vote for Witnesses. Your vote is very very important. Every Steemian gets up to 30 votes and it will only take a minute for you to vote.

If you are not sure who to vote for then you can set someone up as your proxy. For example, I have my 30 votes placed on 30 witnesses that I believe are doing a good job. You can set me as your proxy and your votes will then go towards the people I am voting for. Otherwise, you can go manually vote at https://steemit.com/~witnesses

That's all we have for today. We will be back next week with more major updates and news!

Thank for all your support. We are growing both because of and for you. Showing your support for us by voting our witness is appreciated, and is coming back to you in a real and tangible way! If you want to see us tackle something on Steemit, let us know.