First Command Line Post, My Journey to Becoming a Witness.

I have been diligently working the past few weeks to setup a steem witness. A terminal interface is nothing new to me and I have been testing blockchain wallets and apps for years. This has by far been the most technically challenging project I have ever undertaken. With these new skills I decided to make a steemit post from the cli_wallet about my experience so far.

Shout out to @klye @abit @pfunk @inertia @gtg and the rest of the individuals that have assisted me in my journey. Going at this alone is hard so if you are planning to be a witness please reach out, they are more than happy to help. Without them I would not have been able to make this post.

I like to walk the walk so when it comes to steemit I have been an avid supporter, it is only logical that I would do my best to support the platform in the real world and the digital one. The digital support would require the setup of a node and a witness. I saw a post by @gtg calling for more seed nodes because there were not enough and it was enough to motivate me to take the plunge. Sounded easy enough at first but once I started digging things got very technical.

I also wanted to make the point that an outsider can join the club, and be a witness. A lot of people think that the difficulty of this process is intentional so that only a few can profit from supporting the network. Well the difficulty is real and from my understanding the payouts are not even that great. With the monthly fees of the vps I will most likely be lucky to break even.

The majority of the issues were from not doing a git checkout, @pfunk finally helped me on that one. Make sure you follow the directions step by step and do not skip anything, even then you still may have issues. At that point join chat and let them know the output you are getting.

I initially was just doing some testing but have gotten myself vested at this point. Covering the cost of my vps services will be an issue at $60/month, I plan to continue posting amazing content to cover these fees. Any upvotes and resteems will now be going towards supporting my witness also, so feel free!

Reading some of @abit's posts about being a good witness it is suggested that you work on a project with your witness. For me I have been thinking about creating a layer on top of steem for a city blog for my local town. Communities will be coming out soon so I am sure that will help in my quest a lot.

I have close ties to the individuals running our current city blog so it is not a stretch to get adoption once I figure out how to get it done. My idea is just a feed I can iframe into a site, sounds easy enough but I am not even sure where to start. There is a learning curve so any advice is appreciated.

I will be polishing my system and making sure it is ready to go next week. Keep and eye out for my witness post, should be a good one. A big thanks to everyone involved, glad to have a solid blockchain project for 2017!