Using Steempress - my experience so far & the Duplicate Page plugin
I use Wordpress a lot and I am pretty conversant with how it works.
I am also used to its editing interface and features.
When I arrived on steemit the page creation and editing experience, compared to Wordpress, sucked - big time!
But the initial novelty of learning Markdown and getting to grips with its limitations and nuances compensated just a bit, for just a little while.
And I assumed steemit inc would be working hard away at improving the editing interface. After all steemit is a blogging platform so the editing interface is rather important !
Now after 12 months on the platform I am still waiting... The steemit editing interface is basically the same as it was when I started.
So when I found Steempress last week I was delighted - and intrigued.
I was very happy at the prospect of being able to produce my steem posts via the much more accommodating Wordpress editing interface.
Installing Steempress on an existing Wordpress site was totally simple and went without any hitches at all.
If you want to see how that is done check out this excellent post by @hungryhustle :
This is now my fourth post produced using Steempress. It has worked well.Steempress is still in its early stages and there are one or two features missing that will make creating steem posts much simpler once they are incorporated.
The key one of these for me is image alignment. But I understand from @howo that is coming very shortly.
Currently I just edit the code in steemit after publishing and add the required alignment markdown code to get the desired image layout.
That is a bit of a nuisance but it is more than compensated for by all the other benefits of having the familiar and much more accommodating Wordpress editing interface to work in.
My Steempress Use Case
My use of Steempress is probably not the main use case envisaged for the plugin.
In the first instance I am not using it to publish from an existing public blog into steem.
Instead I am using it, in effect, to create an alternate personal publishing system for the steem blockchain.
This gives me the advantage of the much more advanced editing interface of Wordpress.
More importantly it gives me a much better post management system. Steemit is a dreadful place to manage posts - you can't find or access past posts easily at all.
And of course, you cannot readily access the code or edit them after 7 days.
One particular use I will make of Steempress will be for my regular postings such as the weekly SteemRadio schedule of all steem radio shows :
The extensive table layout of this weekly post is going to be my next challenge to translate into Steempress.Currently I keep the markdown code of this post in a text file and then cut, paste and edit into a new steemit post every Sunday.
However once I have it in Steempress I will then just duplicate the post each week, edit the url, update the post and publish to steem through Steempress.
As Wordpress doesn't have a native post duplication feature I am using the well tested Duplicate Page plugin :
https://wordpress.org/plugins/duplicate-page/
Post duplication would make a very tidy little add-on feature to incorporate in a future release of Steempress. (Maybe @howo can add it on his 'to-do' list... )
Although at the moment this is my primary use case of Steempress, I do have a small news blog that I left aside when I started on Steemit. Having Steempress available is inspiring me to revive that site...
That will be a review post for another day.
In conclusion, for anyone familiar with Wordpress who has a Wordpress site available to use, I would strongly recommend the option of using Steempress to create, edit and manage their posts to the steem blockchain.
You might also be interested in some of my other posts :
MY RADIO SHOWS
- My Life in 8 Songs - Thursday 14 June - with @darrenclaxton, @d-vine & @zipporah
- The Alternative Lifestyle Show - Friday 8 June - with guests @alexa.janell, @buzz.lightyear, @bushkill, @makinstuff, @cecicastor and @chrisabdey
- The Alternative Lifestyle Show - Friday 8 June 2018 [recording]
- SteemRadio - schedule of all the steemit radio shows - week beginning 11 June 2018
MY PROJECTS
- A Dollar A Day charitable giving project update : Steem Basic Income for donation recipients, weird smoothies & witness supporters
- A Dollar A Day charitable giving project update : May report : over US$ 1100 donated
- Homesteaders & Preppers on steem - time to revive the list
- One year on Steem, time to refocus...
- Pennsif's Sustainability Curation Digest for MSP - week ending 10 June 2018
[ steempress logo by steempress.io // other graphics by pennsif ]
Wow. 10% of the payout.
I've just checked - it is actually 15% now.
Forget that. Not worth it.
Then again, with the 1M SP it's worth trying it - with the 'tips' you get from steem-io, it might just be worth it. Note the $8 payout @pennsif just got from that account.
Of course that has to outweigh the 15% tax on all other votes!
My word of caution would be to only use it once a day - and don't use it if you expect a good payout on a post else the 15% cut might outweigh the 'tip'.
And you can, at max, only receive one tip every 24 hours.
The Steempress model is not designed for ordinary steemians to use for general posting. It is targeted at non-steemians with Wordpress blogs.
Host of The Alternative Lifestyle Show on MSP Waves Radio.
Editor of the Weekly Schedule of Steem Radio Shows.
Founder of the A Dollar A Day charitable giving project.
My extreme coincidence that is exactly the way I was intending to use it (reading the pins on their discord channel is on my to do list!)
It is absolutely perfect for me - as there is some stuff I want purely on my WP blog, some stuff on purely on here, and some stuff which overlaps.... it fits the bill perfectly for the later...
I was thinking more like 3-4* a week.
I don't earn enough from regular posts for an $8 upvote to cancel out the other 15%!
In short, it's really good for me at this particular moment in time.
👍 I will be interested to see how the rewards hold out as more and more people start using it.
Well, if more people with articles that get rewarded use it, then they will profit handsomely. Not sure about the "tip".
Is there a way to take an extant WP blog and put it on Steemit? Like, can you "republish" old posts here, or only start with the new ones?
Steempress is still quite basic in its features so I think it can only work with newly created Wordpress posts at present.
Host of The Alternative Lifestyle Show on MSP Waves Radio.
Editor of the Weekly Schedule of Steem Radio Shows.
Founder of the A Dollar A Day charitable giving project.
What a great write up. I did my last but one post on my WP blog and used the steem press plug in - it worked perfectly, or nearly perfectly, it didn't center a couple of headings, but other than that, all good.
This is just great as I can now produce stuff in google docs, embed links just by using the link button, cut and paste into WP and then - steemit. So much less hassle, you're right.
And you are 100% right - this platform is a real pain to post on, so now at least any sociology type posts that overlap I can cross-post.
However, I will be keeping a very close eye on my SEO. Google really likes my WP blog ATM, to the tune of >500K views a month. I definitely don't want that going south because of duplicate posting.
It is ideal for someone with an existing Wordpress blog.
But the SEO is something I am unsure about. Steempress offer the delay function (up to 7 days?) to help mitigate SEO / duplication issues but I am not fully sure that will work.
I had been looking at using it with a WordPress news site I had been running but by its very nature that wouldn't work as there would be no value in publising 7 day old news to steemit.
I've already decided to not use it for my main sociology posts which do well, just for my more niche critical posts or news summaries, for the later I'd use a shorter time delay.
I will look out for them...
Does post scheduling work for SteemPress?
I tried another WordPress plugin and it wouldn't allow for it.
I probably should have just bit the bullet and built my own WordPress plugin.
I don't believe it can handle scheduling at present.
Host of The Alternative Lifestyle Show on MSP Waves Radio.
Editor of the Weekly Schedule of Steem Radio Shows.
Founder of the A Dollar A Day charitable giving project.
You can set the number of minutes you want to delay posting to steemit in the settings. Which is kind of scheduling I guess!
No, that's not scheduling at all.