A majority of this past week’s focus for the Po.et development team has been centered around cleaning up the technical structure of the production environment and feeds, as well as updating the documentation on GitHub. We still have a lot to do in terms of being able to quickly onboard community members that want to contribute to the codebase, but we encourage everyone to take a look at the documentation for our node and web app.

Given the rise of phishing attempts in public slacks across the entire blockchain ecosystem, we have decided to move our slack community over to Discord. We also have a vibrant Telegram channel and WeChat (group name: Po.et 官方一群) channel for users who are already on-boarded to those messaging platforms.

Updates

We began working on the Wordpress integration this week, you can stay updated on the progress by following our repository. In terms of the configuration, the goal is to abstract the verification process as much as possible. We want works to be broadcast to the Po.et network as soon as the author publishes the work locally to their blog. We also aim to create the Wordpress shortcode [poet-badge] that will provide the Po.et badge on each post.

We’re also happy to let the community know that we’ve timestamped 909 works so far! This number is quickly growing and we strongly encourage content creators to reach out if you’d like to generate Po.et verification badges for your work. Increasing the number of works registered on the platform helps us better stress-test our system to ensure it’s ready for high volume content catalogs.

The Po.et team has also been showcasing the project to communities around the world. Max Bronstein and Elliot Feeny spoke on a panel in NYC for the New York Blockchain and Digital Media meetup. David Bailey documented the token sale process in front of hundreds of executives at Distributed Health. Lastly, Jeremy Kandah introduced a large room of entrepreneurs to Po.et at Austin’s Capital Factory.

Po.et Feeds

#17 — Integrating Must. Eat. World. as an alpha partner. Works are read from their XML feed and automatically posted to Po.et.

#20 — Integrating BTC Echo into our alpha partner program. Works are read from their XML feed and automatically posted to Po.et.

#21 — Integrating Blockchain Bloggen as an alpha partner. Works are read from their XML feed and automatically posted to Po.et.

Po.et Platform

#308 — Walter is working on storing the Bitcoin transaction id in our database immediately after timestamping the work. At the moment, the transaction id isn’t saved after the transaction is broadcasted, and thus we have to wait for the block to be discovered by Po.et before getting it. This fix will help us debug any issue and build better architecture in the future.

#309 — Allows Po.et to handle bitcoin wallets with huge amounts of outputs. Also refactored core functions and improved the node’s README.

#311 — New configurable parameter: Minimum Block Height. This is the height at which Bitcoin Scanner starts scanning the blockchain. Correctly configuring this greatly improves start up speed.

#312 — We’re now using a custom Insight API so we don’t have to rely solely on test-insight.bitpay.com. This option allows us to configure the address of the insight API we want to use to timestamp works. Also includes a change needed to support url’s with sub-paths for the auth web socket, app.po.et/api/auth is up and running.

#316 — Fixed isOutputCorrectNetworkAndVersion function

#317 — Ability to debug the Po.et Node’s code line by line, inspect variables and live-reloading of the code. This feature will greatly improve the debugging experience. Currently supported for Visual Code, but we’re working on adding support for WebStorm.

Open Issues

#9 — New endpoint to post your works to. This one will be easier to integrate and better documented. We’re starting by integrating it to feeds. We plan to integrate it into the frontend in the future.

#310 — Lays out the foundational elements the development team is researching before building the wordpress integration. Since most popular CMS platforms use php, the development team will start duplicating the poet-js codebase into php. This issue discusses what type of functionality the production grade wordpress module should have like bulk posting and automatic verification badges.

#12 — UI Improvement: in the Search Results, display the work’s owner name and link to the profile.

#313 — The Node has a functionality built in order to make the API simpler to consume: when requesting a work by its id, if the work’s author is registered in Po.et, the response will include information about the work’s author. This ticket addresses a bug in this feature.

Hiring

We’re actively looking for talented developers. If you’re a Full-Stack Developer or DevOps Specialist and interested in working for/with Po.et, reach out to us at contact [at] po.et.

What’s Next