Some of you may have noticed the po.et badge on my blogs posts; if all goes well with the beta testing described in this post, you can scroll down to the bottom to see one. As I wrote in this article, the goals of po.et align with the goals of any content creator – provide an easy way to display and verify proof of publishing, and make it very very difficult for anyone to claim otherwise.

These po.et badges and the integration that underlies them have pointed to a testnet. Po.et has recently moved to the mainnet. There is a beta 2 of a plug-in that points to the mainnet…and as long as it’s not beta 1 (!) I thought I’d give it a shot. I downloaded the beta 2 plug-in from its GitHub (see image below).

If you click on the issues link, at this time it doesn’t appear to support the recently released wordpress 5.0 version. I’m waiting a few versions before going for that upgrade to that won’t affect me.

My main goals for doing this upgrade are:

moving the proof of publication of previous works that have the Po.et badge to the mainnet.

provision proof of publication of going forward works (like this lovely post you are reading)

supporting po.et and giving feedback.

Looking at issue #54 titled “Backfill not working” may make the first goal a bit tricky. But we shall see.

Downloaded the zip file, went to the plug-ins “Add Plug-ins” page, selected the zip file and hit the not-so-big install button.

The plug-in appeared to install fine. I was worried that it would overwrite the existing po.et plug-in, but it did not. It doesn’t recognize the beta2 version as being newer, but that is probably as designed.

There is a beta users migration guide here. A new key is needed for mainnet, so I created a new account, toggled the button to move to Mainnet and created an API key. I deactivated the current 1.0.2 version, activated the 1.0.2-dev version, and noticed an issue – no settings were displayed.

The previous issue that I had with the testnet plug-in (issue #24 from April 19) was fixed with a WordPress upgrade. As of this writing, this site is on 4.9.8 so unless it requires 5.0 (and an open issue implies it does not) there must be some other answer. The good news is that even though there is no link to settings on the plug-in page, there is one in the Settings section of WordPress. It looks like this (after I entered my author name and checked both boxes).

I pasted in my newly minted mainnet key, and Saved Changes.

The first thing to check on was did the “Backfill all posts” work? I went to my most recent article, scrolled to the bottom, and found what looked like the remnants of the old po.et badge, and a new badge with an obvious incorrect date on it.

I clicked on the badge and the link it led to was definitely on the mainnet, but the page said to be patient, sync might take 10 minutes. I went back to the first article that I had a po.et badge on (about Iceland, you can read it…I’ll wait) in case there was a first-in-first-out approach, but was greeted with the same page (see below). I have clicked the “Save Changes” button at 8:59pm (so says the screenshot). I decided to attempt to be patient and watch the San Jose Sharks whoop the Dallas Stars. But this was unsatisfying because they were behind.

Thirty minutes later, and the old posts still did not appear to be backfilling to the mainnet. Checked the preview and there was no po.et badge there (didn’t expect there to be). So I’m going to undo all sharing options, publish this and see if there is a mainnet badge. And the come back and update.

And I am happy to report there was a poet badge with today’s date on it. It is the featured image of this post. It says December 8, 2018 03:34 as the timestamp; local time for publishing was December 7, 2018 21:34 so perhaps this is server time but not wordpress time (see the top of this post, it says published December 7). I clicked on the po.et badge and got to the wait 10 minutes page. The Sharks at lost (somehow!) so I waited.

And then it was there.

And the technical page:

The ipfs link on the content page holds the text (and I’ll be interested to see if it gets updated).

So we’re on the mainnet. Big congrats to the devs and everyone at po.et. I’ll report the timestamp issue (it could be that it is GMT) and the possible settings issue, and try out the next plug-in betas.

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