Dear friends,
It's been 3 years since I first joined this blogging platform. As you may know I used it to share my various comics. I met amazing artists, had wonderful feedback and great success. This has been a life changing experience for me and I wish other struggling content creator out there could enjoy the same journey.
I started drawing comics and posting them online 8 years ago. I faced many issues along the way but HiveBlog/Steemit has been a way to overcome them. Other platforms have gate keepers preventing you from reaching the front page. Their reward system is limited or inexistant. I am convinced a decentralized system like Hive is the answer to these issues.
From my very first post on Steemit/HiveBlog, my goal was always to bring over more creative story tellers. However, let's face it... HiveBlog is not optimized for long form story telling!
What needs to be solved.
It's hard to read a story on HiveBlog.
Long form content usually involves creating a series of links to go from one page to the other which is a pain to manage.
The content is usually followed by a detailed blog to add depth to the post. This can actually take you out of the story, preventing you to keep on reading.
Looking at a profile page can seem chaotic as many series could interlace and get mixed up with blogs and reblogs.
The world of crypto-currencies can be daunting at first. Between exchange rates, witnesses, powering down etc... New comers could be overwhelmed with all this options and stay away all together.
How I am solving this.
I am creating Inkito, an interface that uses the Hive api specifically for long form content.
Each series has a unique tag wich is used to locate and organise episodes in order.
Improved reading experience with automated navigation links and the option of infinite scrolling.
Series are displayed with a unique cover on the main page and the profile page.
The interface is simplified to attract more long-form content creators.
A banner for promoted content would allow an opportunity for creators to be seen at the top.
What Inkito can bring to the Hive blockchain.
The option of a better reading experience for existing Hive content.
Exclusive quality content that brings dedicated readers and creators weekly.
Money turned into HIVE with the use of the promoted area.
Links
I have acquired the domain and already deployed a prototype. You can visit https://www.inkito.io/ to see the prototype.
This would be link to the original design templates:
https://xd.adobe.com/view/42ac7b62-e431-4956-7236-2116fb50ea57-349d/
And finally the link to the Github repository:
https://github.com/Jrejoire/Inkito
The project is currently as an Alpha phase with read only features. I'll be soon implementing interactions and publishing for the working prototype.
For any interested Hive creator out there!
You can already add your content to the platform using the right tags.
Adding the series id on all corresponding posts, writing it as follows "author-seriesname" (example: "jrej-shadesofmen") The series name is for you to choose but must be the same for all episodes.
Adding the tag "inkito-comics" or "inkito-novels" on your most recent post for ranking.
Optionally you can add categories as tags in your first episode. The categories could be any of the following. "action, comedy, drama, fantasy, horror, mystery, romance, scifi, sliceoflife"
The first post would include some of the main series info. The first image would be your series cover image and the title, the series title. Hope to see some of you over there.
The Proposal
I am launching a proposal (#94) for this project as I believe it can benefit the Hive blochain in the long run. I am a trusted and well connected artist in the webcomic world and can easily promote the blockain to fellow artists once the reading experience is optimized.
I have a decade of experience in the webcomic online publishing, I have trained myself for the past few years in web development which allowed me to start working on the single page application protoype with react as a framework.
I have as a mission to give any creator, big or small, the opportunity to be discovered and rewarded for its hard work. I truly believe each voice is worth something so I am determined to give everyone this chance.
Supporting this proposal will help me in developing the Inkito platform faster.
Click here to Approve the proposal
More updates on the project following @inkito
Thanks for your support.
See you on the other side.
Jrej
👋Hi @jrej,
Good news! We've added Inkito to the
Hive Blockchain Directory, here:
https://hivewhat.com/directory/inkito/
Swarm!
Great news. Thanks a lot!
My friend, this convinced me to come back to Steemit/Hive :) I will repost and definitely stick around. Thanks!
That's great news. Since you were gone,a new feature was set for unlimited edit on posts. Very helpful to update links or change images.
Fantastic start! Reblogged and supported! As I get a bit more time to play around with it, I’ll try to give any constructive feedback. Also, as you move forward with any recruiting please let me know if I can assist in creating any new accounts. I have 200+ account tokens ready and keep claiming what I can.
Thanks a ton for the support. I will be implementing login next week so I'll look into account tokens and all. I saw many dapps with extra fast registering. That will definitely a must when comes the time to on board people. I'll keep you posted Bryan.
Ps: Please hit me with some feedback whenever you like. I'd love to read your thoughts so far.
Just played around a bit adding tags to an old series. The site seems to be picking up the posts fine! I did notice that the tags need to be within the first five, which is important when using an interface like PeakD where more are allowed.
The big problem I have at the moment is it seems to not be rendering my main comic strip images. I even tried reloading them as the link path might have been outdated.
Image is rendering out fine on other front ends, and Inkito picked up the first strip fine as the frontpage thumbnail image, but not within the content itself.
The only other two design/UI notes I have at current are that image sizing needs to be adjusted on desktop somehow. Portrait orientation pages of yours are so big I can't easily see them all in one shot which is particularly troubling when it's a big image or splash page.
I don't know if this means a zoom tool, or max width adjustment. Max width though you'd want different specifications for landscape formatted content.
And lastly, the footer with creator links and info should probably be a sidebar or a "floating" footer somehow. With the continuous load feature you have now, it's almost impossible to see or navigate to, especially with content that has lots of installments like your stuff!
Overall, very impressive start with lots of potential. I'm so impressed you've been learning web development and coding on the side these past years. You rock!
Thanks a ton for taking the time to add your own series. That is a lot of help as I'll make some adjustment to fit it in. The main issue seems to be the configuration of the markdown reader for links. I'll look into this first thing.
The zoom option is a great idea, I'll add it to the list of implementation. As you said for splash page it would be nice to have this option.
Finally for the creator footer. I think I'll render it only on the final page. Simply adding the follow and share directly in the info tab underneath each page or in the top banner. Thanks for pointing that out.
As for coding, I plan for a career change. I used a mix of sites like freecodecamp and udemy classes and then went through a lot of intervews with technical challenges. The lockdown has slowed down the job search but it's a great opportunity to work on what is the most important for me.
Also curious if I'll need to remove that supplementary content to not have it show in the primary feed. I noticed your multi page posts all render out. I like having it in the "dropdown" blog box after each chapter/installment but there would need to be a way to set a breakpoint within the post between art & blog content for Inkito to read.
I must admit I formatted my content a bit to avoid images in the description part. I'll think of a way to add a breakpoint to add images into the blog underneath. Looking at other webcomic hosting out there, having only text underneath is pretty standard.
I'm playing with the idea to incorporate blogs which are not part of a series seperatly in the profile page, giving a chance to supplement the comics with some more process pics.
I'll keep you posted with the latest improvements. We'll definitely make your content look good in there. Thanks again for joining in.
Great idea! I am sure it would be useful for a lot of my projects. I have trouble approving the proposal, but I guess I'll work that out somehow.
Looks very interesting! I look forward to seeing this go from strength to strength.
@tipu curate
Upvoted 👌 (Mana: 12/18)
A big thank you for your feedback. I hope to impress you even more going forward. I'm continuing my daily grind on the project to get to a working beta asap. Stay tuned! ;-)
I went to your profile after reading this article. and I looked at his drawings. perfect talent!.
Oh that's so nice of you to say. I can see you're very talented with writing yourself. Things like your diary could very well fit into the site if you'd like them organised in order. Thanks for the support anyway.
oh .. thank you for visiting. Actually, I am very incompetent in writing. My english sucks !! I will definitely consider the suggestion :) stay safe..
Me: what the actual, I was following you.
Also me: oh wait different platform derp.
This sounds like it would be incredibly useful for video series. Do you need to use all the special tags? I'm guessing that they don't need to be first given how many there are XD
Supported proposal too.
Thanks a lot for supporting my proposal!
Even though the platform was not originally intended for video series, I think it could work out. A playlist might be better as you would not need the infinite scroll for videos. Are you posting on dtube or youtube link in hive blogs, I wonder?
As for tags, they don't need to be the first but do need to be within the first 5. The most important are the series id ("name-series") which should be in every episode. Then one "inkito-comics" or "inkito-novels" for referencing. A specific one for videos would be needed depending on how its formatted. I'll need to think about this. Hope you make it in there ;-)
Not doing anything that exciting right now as I'm still very much in the building stage XD
I managed to completely forget about infinite scroll, was more thinking about how to tie everything together, yep playlist is definitely better x_x I've been (extremely) intermittently (because I don't have anything worth posting yet) using dtube.
And how can he go, because because of hivesigner does not let?
Thanks for mentioning. I updated my dns records. The issue was with the "www" address. The changes should propagate in a few hours. I'll let you know when log in is back up.