BlockPress.Me

What is BlockPress.Me?

At the Steemfest hackathon in Lisbon, I began work, with support from @dana-varahi and @hkjn on BlockPress.Me, a javascript/jquery based open source cms designed to pull its content from various blockchains. For example, the idea is that anyone with a webserver could take this code, and create a personal blog site, pull content from their steem posts, possibly filtered by tag or metadata. No backend programming language or database would be required.

What is my contribution?

So far I have made 42 commits. I have deliberately made the code itself according to the KISS(*) philosophy, so I built a 13 line, 231 byte loading html page, that displays a loading message, and includes the jquery script. It also loads the initialisation script. From that point onwards, all content is loaded via ajax with the help of jquery.

(*) KISS = Keep It Simple Stupid!

The initialisation script first loads the configuration file. This comes in json format and pretty much defines what content the site will hold. The initialisation script lets the config tell it which content modules to load, which theme to load, what content module to display as the initial page, and what to put in the menu. Typically the menu buttons will also replace the content of the page, via ajax, with further content modules defined in the config file.

Does it get data from the blockchain yet?

Yes, although a bit more work is needed to make this content useful. The blockpress steem module loads the official steem javascript api script, and it uses this to get data from the steem blockchain.

My latest commit has extended the steem content module to allow the loading of steem profile data. The individual theme can override the default look and feel of the displayed steem profile. So far the supported data only includes the banner image, the display name, and the steem username. This is proof of concept stage. Each display element is optional. I plan to expand the profile display to include description, post, followers and following counts, wallet ballances, reputation, steem power value, vests, steemitboard badges, location, website and join date. I may also expand to include other data contained in returned steem profile object, or calculable or constructed from it.

See a demo of the profile retrieve on anton.blockpress.me

When will it be usable?

Hard to provide an accurate estimate right now, but there isn't too much to do. I need to add support for the rest of the profile fields, or delegate it to Dana. I need to add support for displaying the content of a steem post. And I need to add support for a streem of steem posts.

For anyone capable of editting a json config file this will then be pretty usable for creating custom steem based themable blog sites.

For those that want to wait till we have an editor interface for modifying your config file, you'll have to wait a little longer.

My commits to blockpress on github...

• 52 Commits, including three that failed to link with github profile