We have some amazing news to share with you, and we can barely contain ourselves!

EasySignUp and EasyLogin - First on the Steem Blockchain

First impressions matter. That’s why the most important step in onboarding new users to a platform is the signup process. But a new user curious enough about Steem is immediately confronted with one of the platform’s toughest challenges: either a wait-time of up to two weeks, or a payment. And then, even if they’re willing to wait or pony up, they have to secure multiple keys which can never be lost. For a seasoned cryptocurrency veteran, perhaps this is no problem. But for someone new to the platform who's used to signing in to social media with their pet's name as a password? It can be a nightmare … a bad initial experience that might turn them off Steem and TravelFeed entirely, and perhaps forever.

Recently, we wanted to introduce TravelFeed to a friend, bragging about our new editor and the awesome dashboard. He already had a Steem account (or "Steemit account", as he remembered it from back in 2017) and after a few minutes, managed to find the sheet with his private keys. After clicking on "login", at first he thought that he had to install the Steemconnect Desktop App, then we told him to click on "continue", but now Steemconnect was asking him for his "Steem password or private key". He was confused, after all he had nine different passwords on his sheet. It took a while until we had explained to him that for his first login, he needs to use his private active key, for any login after that his private posting key, that he can cross out the 4 public keys from his sheet and that he should get a password manager so he wouldn't have to type in the 52-digit private keys every time. Or he could install a browser extension. Needless to say, he wasn't impressed.

This was when we understood that creating our own login system as soon as possible was essential to enable (mass) adaption of TravelFeed and onboarding of new users to Steem. So we did it.

Starting today, TravelFeed is the first dApp based on the Steem blockchain to offer free, easy account creation and login. New users who might be unfamiliar with crypto keys, or the cryptic processes which secure them, won’t even blink an eye through our easy onboarding process we're calling EasySignUp.

If you would like to join TravelFeed and don't have a Steem account yet, go to TravelFeed.io and click on "Sign Up". We then ask you to confirm your email.

Since a lot of travellers do not have access to a sim card when travelling, we do not require phone number verification. Instead, we ask you to complete your profile and write your first post on TravelFeed, introducing yourself to the community. If you need ideas for your first post, we've included a great video by @coruscate from @steemonboarding. We then manually approve accounts within no more than 24 hours.

Once your account has been approved, you can choose a username and then pick your account type. For geeks and cryptocurrency enthusiasts we offer a regular Steem account, but for regular users we recommend choosing the option "Steem Account + TravelFeed EasyLogin". We then ask you to pick a password with a minimum of 10 characters and that's all you need to fully interact with TravelFeed.io. It's just like logging into any other social media platform, because we’re handling all the difficult, behind-the-scenes stuff.

We do provide you with all the super important Steem keys and the passphrase, when you sign up, and we urge you to take note of them, back them up and make sure they're secure! We offer you to download your private keys as txt file and ask you to confirm your passphrase again before we create your account. While you can fully use TravelFeed with EasyLogin, you will need these keys to interact with other platforms on the Steem blockchain and to transfer funds. If you lose these keys, you will lose any funds on your account!

Remember the #introduceyourself post that you wrote earlier? It is automatically posted as soon as your account has been created so the TravelFeed community can welcome you. You can now log into your new TravelFeed/Steem account with your username and password if you have chosen EasyLogin and vote, comment, post and follow as much as you want without ever needing your private posting key. To make sure that you have enough RC, we delegate 15 SP to you until you either have enough SP to sustain yourself or have been inactive for a while. For crypto geeks, login with Steem Keychain and Steemconnect is still possible of course.

How secure is it? - The tech part

EasyLogin is as secure as Steemconnect. In fact, we use the same technology: When creating an account with EasySignUp, apart from your posting key, @travelfeed.app is given posting authority. Just like any app that you sign into using Steemconnect, transactions requiring the posting key can now be signed and broadcasted by us on your behalf. EasyLogin can not be used to move your funds.
When you sign into TravelFeed with EasyLogin, we give you a token and using that, every time you vote, comment, post or follow/unfollow, this action is sent to our API, we check if you are authorised and if everything is ok, we sign and broadcast the transaction to the Steem blockchain. Unlike Steemconnect, you can sign in to TravelFeed with EasyLogin using your email/username and a password of your choice that we save using encrypted and hashed using bcrypt. You cannot quite choose your pet's name though, since we do require a certain password strength and a minimum of 10 characters, but that is a huge difference to a sheet full of passwords!
When you create your account with EasySignUp, the passphrase and private keys are generated in your browser, only the public keys are sent to our API to create the account. We never see nor save your private keys.

EasyLogin is available exclusively for new users at the moment, but we will add an option for Steem users to verify your email and enable EasyLogin soon.

Consider Delegating To Us

Your delegation not only supports the growth of this incredible project, but also helps the entire travel community on the Steem blockchain. And once we publish our token, we'll reward you according to your delegation. You will find delegation links at the end of this post. And again, we'd like to thank every single delegator who believes and trusts in us. If TravelFeed becomes as successful as we are confident it will, delegating to us is probably the investment with the highest ROI on Steem right now.

Travel Writing Contest #2 - Total 150 Steem Price Pool 

@invisusmundi promised to make the TravelFeed writing contest a regular thing, and he followed through. He recently opened the second writing contest and even increased the prize pool to a total of 150 Steem. You can participate here and don't forget that only posts published through TravelFeed.io are being considered.

Maximize Possible Upvote From TravelFeed

Not only can you participate in @inviusmundi's contest when posting through TravelFeed.io, we've recently also added additional incentives to publish directly on TravelFeed.io as opposed to simply adding the #travelfeed tag.

Honor Upvotes: If you published through Travelfeed, we increase the upvotes from 50% to 65%

Full Upvotes (the best 5 posts a day including a resteem to the TravelFeed.io frontpage):

If you used TravelFeed.io you still receive our juicy 100% upvote. If you used any other Steem frontend, with our #travelfeed tag you will receive a 90% upvote.

As you can see, using TravelFeed.io really pays off, especially considering that our votes are now backed with a whopping 120k in Voting Power.

More Updates And Bug Fixes

• Add build time environment variables for a better dev experience
• Add a text label to comment and edit buttons. Thanks to @nickyhavey for the suggestion!
• Fix for profiles without geotagged posts not loading posts
• Fix reading time placeholder in editor reading "x min" instead of "x min read"
• Fix preview date in editor
• Fix parsing links when switching from EasyEditor to markdown editor
• Make beneficiary picker clearer (tell users to click on +)

For more details, have a look on Github.

How to Get Involved?

Join the TravelFeed Community! We invite anyone who’s interested in travel to check out TravelFeed.io and to join our over 800-strong community on Discord. We’re also looking for one more curator to join our team.

We ❤️ Open Source: We are proud to make TravelFeed fully Open-Source, and support other communities on Steem who want to build on our code, which can be found on Github. We’re still looking for contributors who want to work with us on the future of TravelFeed. We’re in Beta and continuously improving the software, meaning that there are still some bugs. If you notice anything or have feedback for us, please don’t hesitate to contact us on our Discord, leave a comment or open a bug report on our Github!

As mentioned already, now is a good time to delegate to TravelFeed. Once we launch our token, the airdrop will be based on the amount of SteemPower delegated and your share of the total delegations for each day delegated. This means an advantage for early investors delegating now while our total delegations amount is only 120k SP: a number that we expect to be much higher in the near future. Our Steem Power is fully used for curation of the best TravelFeed posts and we provide temporary delegations of 15 SP to accounts created to us, to help with resource credits. Feel free to use the following links according to the amount you would like to delegate to @travelfeed:

100 SP | 250 SP | 500 SP | 1000 SP | 2500 SP | 5000 SP | 10000 SP | 15000 SP | 25000 SP | 50000 SP

Winners of This Week's Round-up 

And with all this exciting news, we don't want to forget to highlight our three favorite submissions from this week, sharing a total of 6 Steem in rewards.

Three BEST posts of the week

A quick recap - For the weekly round-up, we feature the best 3 posts out of the ones previously featured in the daily topic curation posts in the past week and on top of that 10 honorable mentions that closely did not make it into our resteems last week. The rewards will go to the first three places as follows: 1st place - 3 STEEM, 2nd place - 2 STEEM and 3rd place - 1 STEEM.

🔗 The thumbnails are directly linked to the original posts. Please, click on the image and enjoy the read!

The 1st Place

To be or not to be Dracula’s Castle - One day, three castles in Transylvania
written by @haydae

We had come to Transylvania to discover its rugged landscape and rich heritage, not out of a sole interest for the legend of Dracula. But of course, we couldn’t ignore the myth. It was all over our paper guide and all over our imagination too. Whether we liked it or not, Dracula was forever linked to this wild region of Romania and we just had to go visit the castle that had supposedly inspired Bram Stoker into writing his masterpiece.

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The 2nd Place

El Nido, Palawan: Paradise Soon Gone?
written by @wanderlass

The following afternoon, we went out to the nearby beach called Maremegmeg. My friend went for a swim while another friend and I went for yoga. On a side note, I highly recommend trying out a yoga class at Birdhouse El Nido! I was in awe at every inhale and exhale as I look over the islets from the “birdhouse”.

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The 3rd Place

The Rock-Hewn Churches of Lalibela, Ethiopia | Day 1 (10 Photos)
written by @joshman

Lalibela is located in Northern Ethiopia, and named for the Ethiopian emperor of the same name, whose rein spanned the 12th and 13th centuries. Lalibela was the second capital of Ethiopia established after the fall of the Aksumite kingdom in Aksum. There are a total of 11 rock-hewn churches within the city accredited to Lalibela's reign, although their actual origin is a matter of dispute among experts.

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We hope you have enjoyed these posts. Please do visit the fellow Steemians’ accounts to learn more about their travels!

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