The past few days have been one of the more invigorating times in my life. There's been a lot of soul searching , because @merej99 and I took the leap to become #whaleshares witnesses with our joint witness( @lexiwitness).

This is a responsibility we don't take lightly. We understand the importance of witnesses and their role in the whaleshares ecosystem. We want to be so much more than just assuring the witness is running technically strong and being properly updated. Our huge focus will be community.

• We want to help help foster genuine engagement that leads to to strong relationships and friendships.

This is exactly how @merej99 and I ended up becoming good friends. The interaction we had on Steemit led to a genuine friendship that has led to us working together on a joint witness. Helping foster strong relationships can lead to collaborations that will hopefully lead to accomplishments that might not be possible by oneself.

• Helping mentor others

We have a few ideas in the works of how we want to do this. It could be through challenges, competitions, and even leading by example through our own writing. The goal will be to help improve the writing of others, proper use of tags, learning how to layout your posts, how to make an intriguing title...There is so much you can do to make your posts more appealing to engage the whaleshares community!

I am always learning in the writing/layout improvement category. It will be great to have others join us as we continuously strive to improve and it is my wish that we all have fun doing it.

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Why Whaleshares?

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It's no big secret that @merej99 and I were early adopters of Steemit. We will still be active in that community. I personally have a Steemit Military Veteran Group I will stay deeply involved with. Granted, our post count may decrease because of the responsibility we have on this platform being a witness, but it's a challenge we will have to learn to juggle.

Speaking for myself, I am excited about the competition whaleshares brings in the blockchain social media space. When we have competition it motivates all parties to strive harder to build a better product. I believe this competition is vital to the long term success of blockchain, but it also will result in a better experience for you and me!

The current size of the Whaleshares community is also another reason to join the platform. @lexiwitness aims to help this community grow strong and if we can influence high user engagement and mentor others with their writing at an early stage then hopefully these strong habits will continue as the platform grows. This strong nucleus could spread like a virus and continue to positively affect others as the platform grows, thus helping Whaleshare be a platform with continuous quality content and new friendships developed.

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The witness set up struggle

This is the nitty-gritty you all probably really want to read. A quality you will get from Mer and I is being genuine. We know we have our own quirks as people. There are days we both have to embrace the suck and "keep stepping". Life isn't always rosy and I don't intend to portray an online presence with that image. We are real people and have shared many of our most deepest feelings and thoughts on the blockchain. I hope it helps others to know the ups and downs are real, but if you "keep stepping" then you accomplish some magnificent things.

So, the witness setup. The suck was real. It took us a tremendous amount of time to get the witness running properly. For a few days the witness kept forking at around Block 487,000. Mer and I poured through documents online to try and figure out what the error was until almost 8(CST)in the morning. Then Mer found the discrepancy. It was one of those Ah Hah! moments where you can hear angels in the background.

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The issue?

We were using the incorrect cli_wallet and whaled files! Once we had the correct version, the chain synced properly.

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So, now we are pumped. But...we knew still had to find our first block. We still weren't completely satisfied about if our witness was set up properly and wanted to see that first block be confirmed.

Then it happens.

The witness failed to find the first block!

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At that moment, I didn't know if I should rage or curl into a fetal position.

However, I was pretty confident of what the issue was. I had used a wrong key in the config file set-up! I opened an old word file and inserted a key from a previous witness server set up attempt! Once, I found the culprit and changed it...then we waited until our turn in the rotation and.....

Success!

So, it's official. We are Whaleshares witnesses!

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I would be remiss if I did not give a big shout out to witness @chronocrypto for his help. Also, thank you to @ceruleanblue for taking the time to explain some coding to me.

Also, if you support @lexiwitness's mission we'd be honored if you would cast your witness vote for us on the witness page.

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