So, I'd like to present this topic as a conversation piece.
I'm a huge fan of Steemit and see it going places, but I have a personal quandary. You see, I have a domain name for my blog. I've had it for years - 13 to be exact. I like to "own" my content to some degree, or at least have an archive of it that I can rely on being under my control. I don't write a lot of blog articles, but when I do, I'd love to share them across various channels, particularly Steemit.
That all said, Steemit isn't really designed to support this scenario. Yes, I could post it on my blog and copy/paste the content to Steemit, but, not only is that bad for SEO reasons, it just feels strange. I had this same issue with Medium back in the day. Now, I get it from the flip-side. Having control over the content from Steemit's perspective, or Medium's perspective, etc. is the benefit and therefore the goal.
At the end of the day though, it's my content, and while it's not really worth much (at least I don't consider it worth that much today), it is my content, and I feel I should have control over that. After all, this is why we have copyright laws. Despite copyright, which is quite outdated in my opinion, the real value of content is being able to display and "use" it. Steemit has a fantastic model for "using" your content. In fact, Steemit is basically giving you a monetization platform for your content that pays over time.
Regardless of this, and I understand both sides very well. I, personally, would like the ability to have the best of both worlds. I mean, who doesn't want to eat their cake?
The proposal I have is fairly simple, but also could be a bit of a side-bar for the time - not sure. I'd like to see the blog section expanded to include templating capabilities and CNAME support as well as the ability to delete posts I've made and have the ability to export.
While it's unlikely that I'd delete posts, I'd probably export them and import into another platform in the future. However, should that be a decision made, I'd still like that capability. The CNAME support and templating are important to me for posterity reasons. I just like having my own domain and branding. I realize that's not for everyone, but it is for me.
I'd love to hear other people's thoughts on this topic. I apologize in advance if this has already been discussed. If so, please point me in the right direction. Cheers!
Deleting posts is technically impossible, you can't delete from the blockchain.
What could be done is removing posts from the steemit.com web frontend by having a blacklist or something like that. That still doesn't prevent people from fishing deleted posts from the block explorer, but they won't be shown on the main site. This is a feature that Steemit could add, not sure if it's in their plans or not.
Your suggestion of a blog site that's under your own control (for domain names, themeing, etc.) is interesting. Pretty much just another version of the steemit.com website that would show only your own posts, correct?
But here is the problem that I see:
If visitors log into your site (to comment or vote on your posts, which would get them rewarded with STEEM), then what is to prevent a malicious site from stealing the user's STEEM credentials? You wouldn't want to give your STEEM account data to an untrusted site.
So users would have to go to steemit.com before they could vote/comment on your posts, which kind of defeats the purpose of having your own site, right?
As far as I understand it, there are ways to live source a website's code. If that's the case then perhaps it would be possible to have people trust the site not to steal credentials? Possibly along with general reputations of different websites this could be possible. Also, if you exclusively use posting keys, the risk would be limited to a malicious site posting something from your account, which I do not particularly see as worth the time and effort to design and maintain a site, but I may be wrong.
Thanks for the informed reply. I figured that was the case on the posts being on the blockchain, and yea a blacklist would suffice. This is the least important item of concern with the topic, however.
Regarding the site. There wouldn't be any login process, or anything along those lines. As for the commenting, it'd just use the standard commenting module with steemit. So, when you're designing your templating, you'd just have a series of variable strings like {{comment_block}} that would be parsed to insert the commenting block at the base of a post.
It wouldn't be another version of steemit.com really. It'd be a subsection of the site that's CNAME'd. So you might have jacobt.steemit.com which would be my blog. Then I can take my domain jacobt.com and setup a CNAME record to point to jacobt.steemit.com.
Then, when you load jacobt.steemit.com it'd have my templating. Now, I'm not necessarily advocating for an all out templating system, although that'd be nice. I'd be content with a simple header/footer wrapper that I could add in my settings. That'd allow for a logo, a simple menu, and maybe some footer details. Then, the blog itself would have your posts in a list fashion, as well as a post view.
Naturally over time, this could be expanded on and new features added, but that'd be enough to satisfy me in the meantime.
Another way to look at this is just a personalized page for your posts. The CNAME is just an extra, so I can have my own nice URL to send people to.
I don't see a problem! Man! It's a blockchain! Your content is yours! If you want to display content from your steem blog under your domain go and do it. Launch steemd or @xeroc piston and display whatever wherever you want
Hmm, interesting - yea. I guess there are public APIs for STEEM?
It is not only about public APIs. It is about direct full access to the whole Steem database. You can run your personal node which automatically syncs with Steem network. So you can query your node whatever you want as well is write to Steem blockchain if you have enough Steem Power. You can find out details in developers section of Awesome Steem
Yea, makes total sense. Someone needs to develop an OSS blog lib then based on Steem. ;) ;)
If the goal is promotion of the content, it sounds like the ideal would be to avoid getting destroyed by the search engine algorithms via penalties while showing the content both on the origination site and on Steem. Embedding the content sounds like it could work, like the plugin described by tinfoilfedora below, but are reminiscent of hotlinking. So, would that mean that if the originator site is hacked, the content shared could be changed within Steem and potentially prove problematic for maintaining quality content in perpetuity (via blockchain)? Going back and updating content to maintain relevancy is quite popular so, would there be versioning within Steem to keep "snapshots" of the content with a time stamp? What about reverting back to a previous state of this content? :-S
Being able to Embed a web page into a steemit post would solve your problem, and add a cool feature to steemit. You could post your article on your website, then embed it in a post here with some commentary. This would let you keep control of the master document, and also solve the problem of linking vs copying because it would be easier to simply embed the page in your steemit post.
It comes down to asking the steemit developers to add something like this oEmbed plugin https://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/embedding-wordpress-oembed/
If I'm understanding this correctly though, the integrity of the data availability is subject to the source, no? So, if joe blow's site is down for the count, so is that content on Steemit?
Yes. You said you owned the website, so that shouldn't be a problem.
This place would really get popular if you could embed videos, tweets, instagrams, and whole web pages. It doesn't seem like the cname thing would really do anything for it though.
Yea, I don't disagree with you. However, I don't know that embedded content from my site is necessarily the best solution. It'd be nice to be able to "market" my domain name and still drive traffic to steemit and earn steem dollars.
Embedding is also a must IMO.
Thanks for writing this, man. Want to resteem, but cannot.
I have my own two years old domain name with an average of 1500 unique visit per day that produce an average of $1.00 per day. I am new here at steemit what do you think of my payout after two years time. Average post 1 per day.