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Finally made up your mind, then? Lol.
The possibilities of WP are almost endless, whether it comes to content creation, traffic generation, building a followers base,... anything you can think of. And there is of course SteemPress. All the benefits (??) of Steem, combined with the million more possibilities of WP.
A lot of people's work here deserves a bigger audience than just the members of the platform, and WP is the tool that can, no: will make that happen.

steempress rocks. I am now using it on my non steem blog and I am hoping it becomes a valued added benefit for my blog over others that blog about the same topic as me. right now I am in soft launch mode. I havent done much in terms of notifiy my users what it is all about. In stead I am letting them get use to the look of the new comments section and letting them see some rewards might just spark curiosity ( which is having an effect because I have had some direct emails asking about it)
Feel free to take a look at one of the posts with steempress in use. The content is not up your alley but im just showing you so you can see how it works.
http://theexcelclub.com/how-to-parse-custom-json-data-using-excel/

in simple terms what I am hoping is that people will start to engage, earn rewards for doing so which they can then offset against the prices of my courses. I do hope to power up by brand account here on steem so I can give the rewards.

It is really great idea to implement it like that. And an A+ for your 'sales pitch' - I mean, you've put it in such a way that it will indeed be effective.

But I wondered ever since I tried implementing Steem comments through Steempress on my own WP blog: do people who do not have a SteemIt account have any option to comment?
I couldn't find one on my blog, and now I can't seem to find one on yours. Maybe it is there, and so obvious that I'm not seeing it - it wouldn't be the first time, lol.

Still, if enabling Steem comments in Steempress allows only people with a SteemIt account to comment, you'll be limiting yourself, IMO.

I had seen some Excel posts on the Udemy website when I was checking back on your Steem course. I find such things very interesting, and I see how it works, but at some point my brain simply refuses to process the information. It's a shame, because I'd love to be able to work with it. But apparently, my brain sees and treats JSON as well as Javascript as well as PHP like math. After 5 lines, it simply shuts down and I can't process the info. Maybe I should get myself a real life, preferably handsome (that always helps) teacher one day who can teach my brain to tell the difference... ;0)

you are right, people dont have the option without a steem account to leave a comment and I have removed the old comments section completely. Actually I removed it well before I introduced steem comments because I was getting to much spam. lol having to sign up for steem seems to be a deterant for spammers on my blog anyways. However I also changed the format of my blog. before it was just an educational post with no real reason to interact. Now on each post I add an activity with data for people to copy and I put in some questions for people to answer and then the following week I update the blog post with a video tutorial working though the practice activity. Its all still really new and I see people are click to sign up with steem. When I do the harder launch, fingers crossed it will work out.

Lol I get you about the topic, javascript and PHP mess with my head too. its not for everyone and I guess thats why my email list is successful, people don't sign up to it unless they really want the content.