Installing and using the piston cli command seems to be pretty simple. I am not interested at this point in any kind of write operations, I just want to read for now.

I have dug through the files that pip3 placed in my local pip repository, and I am starting to learn about how things are structured. I will continue to do this because at this point, aside from the good documentation of the CLI client, the ways to invoke it from within python code are not clear to me at all. This is not a complaint. I also think that you absolutely deserve to have earned the some of them incredible rewards your posts about this have earned.

It is a testament to the versatility of this platform. You don't even have to do all the footwork setting up a crowdfunding project to do it. I am sure that you are enjoying some of your payments, as well you should, but I want to add to this project, not directly, but by making something that uses it.

So I see that it appears that I really do need to be running a witness (full) node, ideally. Sure, I can use yours in development, and I will for the time being, since my queries are not going to be frequent. I don't think you will be late on the hosting bills for running it at this point anyway. I want to understand every aspect of this and I am absolutely stoked that I can with one pip3 command have the whole thing in my machine, ready to take my commands, and that it currently defaults to a usable and working RPC endpoint, piston.rocks.

Since I am on a metered connection, albeit fairly cheap (about $12/10gb) I think it better if I don't be running a witness on my little fitlet a10, at least not until I get a nice fat ethernet cable and a 50-100mbit unlimited connection hooked up to my room. I think this little box could handle the job pretty good if it was all it was doing, but I need to also work on this, and that includes using the steemit.com site as well, which is pretty damn heavy going when you load up a well populated comment feed on a post.

I cannot find anything resembling a python library for accessing the library, and there is only one valid command listed on your page so far. A few tips how to dig them out of the mountain of awesome source code you have written would go down well for someone who like me wants to hack this and make use of it.

I wish the whole web ran on python, it absolutely is the best interpreted/VM language in existence, javascript is nasty, and not only that, if python were embedded in webpages, it would be readable! yay whitespace structuring.

I will continue to plug away on this alone, but when you have the time away from your sipping vodka and martinis on maybe a well deserved carribean holiday ;) something to help people who actually want to extend beyond your app to do things as I do, writing a Gtk+-3.0 app built on this, would be fantastic. If I can do half as well getting support to fund this project, I will be putting an RPC endpoint up specifically to use with the app I am developing, which I am calling 'steemportal', also.

I have some ideas which you can find amongst my posts about the idea of creating sidechains to support extended features for Steemit, such as groups, in particular, using a namecoin-like name translation system, or even finding some way to grab a name off namecoin itself and creating a subdomain branch linked off it.

Thanks for any tips you can give, or for that matter, anyone else who knows what they are talking about.