Updated Documentation for SteemConnect V2 JS SDK

tl;dr I have been recently working on integrating SteemConnect V2 via the JS SDK into an app I am developing and had a very difficult time of it. I also encountered a few others having similar issues so I thought I would submit a pull request with updated documentation.

Here are links to the pull request, the current documentation, and my updated documentation.

My Journey with SC2 Integration

Since it's also important that I write a narrative and include a lot of pictures (I'm looking at you utopian bot!) I will share my journey trying to integrate SteemConnect V2 into my application with you so you can better understand why I feel that good documentation is so important.

First I went to steemconnect.com and it had a link to setup my app and download the JavaScript SDK - great, this will be easy! Or so I thought...

I setup my app just fine, and then I clicked on the "Download" button to get the JS SDK and...

#fail...so I do some google searching and realize that steemconnect.com is for V1 of the SDK, not V2. For that you need to go to https://v2.steemconnect.com. Ok we're making progress...slowly.

There's a very nice-looking button to start building - great, this will be easy! I didn't learn my lesson the first time. That button takes you to a page to sign up for their email list, and provides no information about actually building with SC2!

So far I've basically gotten nowhere. Back to Google and I find the GitHub repo for the SC2-SDK. I take a look at the documentation with still a glimmer of hope that it will be helpful and informative but (you guessed it) it was not.

It only listed 5 of the available methods in the SDK and there was no information on how to set up an app or explain how it works. At this point I started asking around in the steemconnect channel in steem.chat and in the Busy Discord and was pointed to the (seemingly unpublished) link to set up an app in SteemConnect V2: https://v2.steemconnect.com/dashboard

So I started the process of adding a new app and found out that it needs to create a new Steem account for your app and that costs 6 STEEM.

I wasn't quite ready to spend 6 STEEM at this point since I still had no idea how this works and whether it would work for what I was trying to do. So I went back to the chat channels and was pointed to this demo project (https://steemit.github.io/sc2-angular) that I could use to test SC2 and learn how to use it before spending the 6 STEEM to make my own app.

Are we there yet?

Now I FINALLY had what I needed to get started integrating the SteemConnect V2 JS SDK into my app and I had to spend a lot of additional time looking at the source and experimenting with it to figure out what methods were available and what the proper parameters were to pass in. All things that really should be included in the documentation - in my opinion.

So rather than just complain (which I saw others doing about this same thing in the chat rooms) I figured I should spend some time and update the documentation so that others may have an easier time than I did with this process.

A Big Thank You

I've said many times in the past that I believe third party sites and services are the future of the Steem platform. SteemConnect is a really great tool and it is vital to the development of those third party sites and services. Despite the difficulties I experienced I want to say how appreciative I am of all the work that has been put in to the SteemConnect project and of the help I was given in the chat rooms. A special thank you goes to @fabien and @netuoso for their help in particular.

We are all invested in the future of Steem and these are the people who are making it happen. Whether or not my pull request is accepted I hope to continue to help make the Steem platform a great place for developers in the future.

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