01_blog_feed

Blog Feed

By the end of this tutorial you should know how to fetch most recent five posts from particular user on Steem.

This tutorial pulls a list of the most recent five user's posts from the blockchain and displays them in simple list. Also some notes about usage of client.database.getDiscussions API.

Intro

Tutorial is demonstrates the typical process of fetching account blog posts. It is quite useful if you want to embedd your blog posts on your website these tutorial will help you achieve that goal as well. This tutorial will explain and show you how to access the Steem blockchain using the dsteem library to build a basic blog list of posts filtered by a tag

Steps

1. Configure connection Configuration of dsteem to use proper connection and network
2. Query format Simple query format to help use fetch data
3. Fetch data and format Fetch data and display in proper interface

---

1. Configure connection

In order to connect to the live Steem network, all we have to do is provide connection url to a server that runs on the network. dsteem by default set up to use live network but it has flexibility to adjust connection to any other testnet or custom networks, more on that in future tutorials.

In first couple lines we require package and define connection server:

const { Client } = require('dsteem');

const client = new Client('https://api.steemit.com');

2. Query format

• You can add a tag to filter the blog posts that you receive from the server, since we are aiming to fetch blog posts of particular user, we will define username as tag.
• You can also limit the number of results you would like to receive from the query

var query = {
    tag: 'steemitblog', // This tag is used to filter the results by a specific post tag
    limit: 5, // This limit allows us to limit the overall results returned to 5
};

3. Fetch data and format

client.database.getDiscussions function is used for fetching discussions or posts. The first argument to this function determines which equivalent of the appbase condenser_api.get_discussions_by_* api calls it's going to use. Below is example of query and keyword 'blog' indicates condenser_api.get_discussions_by_blog and somewhat counter-intuitively query.tag indicates the account from which we want to get posts.

    client.database
        .getDiscussions('blog', query)
        .then(result => {
            var posts = [];
            result.forEach(post => {
                const json = JSON.parse(post.json_metadata);
                const image = json.image ? json.image[0] : '';
                const title = post.title;
                const author = post.author;
                const created = new Date(post.created).toDateString();
                posts.push(
                    `<div class="list-group-item"><h4 class="list-group-item-heading">${title}</h4><p>by ${author}</p><center><img src="${image}" class="img-responsive center-block" style="max-width: 450px"/></center><p class="list-group-item-text text-right text-nowrap">${created}</p></div>`
                );
            });

            document.getElementById('postList').innerHTML = posts.join('');
        })
        .catch(err => {
            alert('Error occured' + err);
        });

The result returned form the service is a JSON object with the following properties:

[
    {
        "id": 37338948,
        "author": "steemitblog",
        "permlink": "join-team-steemit-at-tokenfest",
        "category": "steemit",
        "parent_author": "",
        "parent_permlink": "steemit",
        "title": "Join Team Steemit at TokenFest!",
        "body":
            "<a href=\"https://tokenfest.adria.digital\"><img src=\"https://i.imgur.com/fOScDIW.png\"/></a>\n\nHello Steemians! If you’d like to meet Team Steemit live-in-person, or are just interested in attending what promises to be a great blockchain conference, join us at <a href=\"https://tokenfest.adria.digital/\">TokenFest</a> in San Francisco from March 15th to 16th. \n\nSteemit CEO, Ned Scott, will be participating in a fireside chat alongside Steemit’s CTO, Harry Schmidt, as well as the creator of Utopian.io, Diego Pucci. Steemit will also be hosting the opening party on Thursday night and we’d certainly love to meet as many of you as possible IRL, so head on over to https://tokenfest.adria.digital/ and get your tickets while you can. \n\n*Team Steemit*",
        "json_metadata":
            "{\"tags\":[\"steemit\",\"tokenfest\",\"conference\"],\"image\":[\"https://i.imgur.com/fOScDIW.png\"],\"links\":[\"https://tokenfest.adria.digital\",\"https://tokenfest.adria.digital/\"],\"app\":\"steemit/0.1\",\"format\":\"markdown\"}",
        "last_update": "2018-03-07T23:22:54",
        "created": "2018-03-07T20:56:36",
        "active": "2018-03-13T01:40:21",
        "last_payout": "1970-01-01T00:00:00",
        "depth": 0,
        "children": 29,
        "net_rshares": "11453442114933",
        "abs_rshares": "11454054795840",
        "vote_rshares": "11454054795840",
        "children_abs_rshares": "13568695606090",
        "cashout_time": "2018-03-14T20:56:36",
        "max_cashout_time": "1969-12-31T23:59:59",
        "total_vote_weight": 3462435,
        "reward_weight": 10000,
        "total_payout_value": "0.000 SBD",
        "curator_payout_value": "0.000 SBD",
        "author_rewards": 0,
        "net_votes": 77,
        "root_comment": 37338948,
        "max_accepted_payout": "0.000 SBD",
        "percent_steem_dollars": 10000,
        "allow_replies": true,
        "allow_votes": true,
        "allow_curation_rewards": true,
        "beneficiaries": [],
        "url": "/steemit/@steemitblog/join-team-steemit-at-tokenfest",
        "root_title": "Join Team Steemit at TokenFest!",
        "pending_payout_value": "46.436 SBD",
        "total_pending_payout_value": "0.000 STEEM",
        "active_votes": [
            {
                "voter": "steemitblog",
                "weight": 0,
                "rshares": "1870813909383",
                "percent": 10000,
                "reputation": "128210130644387",
                "time": "2018-03-07T20:56:36"
            },
            {
                "voter": "kevinwong",
                "weight": 526653,
                "rshares": "2208942520687",
                "percent": 5000,
                "reputation": "374133832002581",
                "time": "2018-03-08T04:27:00"
            }
        ],
        "replies": [],
        "author_reputation": "128210130644387",
        "promoted": "0.000 SBD",
        "body_length": 754,
        "reblogged_by": []
    }
]

From this result we have access to everything associated to the post including additional metadata which is a JSON string that must be decoded to use. This JSON object has additional information and properties for the post including a reference to the image uploaded. And we are displaying this data in meaningful user interface. Note: it is truncated to one element, but you would get five posts in array

That's all there is to it.

To Run the tutorial

1. clone this repo
2. cd tutorials/01_blog_feed
3. npm i
4. npm run dev-server or npm run start
5. After a few moments, the server should be running at http://localhost:3000/