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... is there anywhere I can see how many upvotes I've used up today, without going to somewhere like steemd and checking manually?

P.S. Sorry for splitting questions up into 3... they came to me after I'd posted each one :p

P.P.S. I see you're from SA... Hi there from Pretoria.

General rule of thumb for newbies is 10 in a 24-hour period. If you have more SP you are able to split your votes. each vote depletes VP by 2%. VP regenerates hourly, I forget by how much but it takes 24hrs to regenerate from 80% to 100% which is 10 votes. Everyone makes that mistake in the beginning

Hello from Jozi :)

Yeah, thanks... learned that lesson already :-)

P.S. Is there anywhere I can see how many upvotes I've already given out in the last 24 hours (other than manually scanning through data on sites like steemd?)

Don't vote on posts older than 7 days, the payout period has passed

... even if it's a really good comment/post, and I'm just feeling generous?
Don't authors (posts and comments) still get $ up until 30 days after?

You can find recent posts by the author and upvote those posts. Or if you find any comments by the author in the post that are recent you can upvote those comments.

No, they don't get paid after 7 days. If you vote, you are just wasting it