Markdown, HTML and the steemstem.io app

Despite the mess currently on-going around Steem, I managed to finalise the deployment of an important feature on the steemstem.io app.

However, before further reading, please consider using your witness votes wisely, if not done already. We can discuss this more into details, e.g. on the SteemSTEM discord.

For what concerns the app, technical information can be obtained directly from our GitHub repository. You can also provide feedback and ask questions through the comments to this post.

As testified by this post, the coronavirus has good sides: I am stuck at home and can go back to other things, on top of family and work. Coding and blogging belong to that category. ;)

Converting Markdown to HTML

As reported months ago by several users, our post editor and viewer had big issues. The problem was sourced to the internal conversion between Markdown and HTML codes. In the previous update, I decided to rely on two public packages to fix this, kramed and meteor-markdown, after pre-processing the body of a post internally.

This was not perfect. Actually, a large majority of posts were still brokenly displayed, especially when videos, links and images were in order. There were unfixable incompatibilities between everything the app was using: the summerlite editor and the two above-mentioned packages.

As existing tools were not working, I decided to create my own method to deal with Markdown and HTML, two commonly used language by the members of our community for post editing. We hence got rid, in the present version of the app (v0.9.25), of all problematic packages.

Videos are now working nicely, as can be seen here or there (this one is pretty amazing), and images and links too, as shown for instance here or there (yes I know this is my own post ;) ).

Another example, illustrated below, could be the latest SteemSTEM distilled.

So what’s next?

I have no answer to that question yet. This will depend on how Steem as a whole will evolve. Personally, I would like to:

integrate keychain through the Steem wallet (the one shipped with the app);
fix article editing (to make it lighter);
combine this app with the SteemSTEM community (see here), as well as with other STEM-related communities;
fix a few bugs related to voting (mis-counting, no reward update, etc…).

What I will do precisely and if I will do it… this the future will tell us ;)

Feel free to share your experience with the app, to report bugs or suggestions via the comments to this post or the #app-discussion channel of the SteemSTEM discord server.

^{PS: This article has been formatted for the steemstem.io front-end. Please see here for a better reading.}