Hi Everyone,
I was looking over some of my older post and found that many were missing images. Some were missing all the images and others just a few. These posts were published between December 2018 and September 2019. For posts published before and after these dates, the images remained. I took a closer look at these posts and found that I had published them using the Busy user interface. See image below.
Both peakd.com and hive.blog had the same problem of displaying these images. I had a quick look to see what was happening with busy.org, this website no longer appears operational. The links to the Busy version of the posts would not open. I’m guessing after the hardfork, which split Steem into Steem and Hive, the Busy team packed it in. I attempted to view my Busy posts on Steemit. Nothing came up at all, as they banned my content several months ago, see my post My Actifit Report Card and Steemit Censorship: June 29 2020 for the full story. I’m guessing this ban must be permanent.
My posts have been removed from my SteemPeak profile page as well. I don't think Steem can claim to be censorship resistant anymore.
I was able to access my Busy posts on SteemPeak directly using the post's URL. The images were still there, which is good as it means they have not just disappeared. I think the problem must relate to the Hive user interfaces not recognising images saved to Busy.
As far as I can see, all of my images saved using SteemPeak, Steemit and Actifit appear in the Hive user interfaces without a problem. I’m not sure if there are any problems with the images uploaded with other Steem user interfaces and DApps. I would recommend checking these posts just to make sure all the images can be viewed. If there is a problem, you should still be able to view these images using SteemPeak.
My solution to the problem
My approach is simple but a little time consuming (i.e. a few hours). I have all of my images saved on my external hard drive. To resolve the problem I uploaded these images to the Hive versions of my posts. It is very easy to find the same images, as the file name is included in the previous upload to Busy, see image below.
Even if you no longer have access to the original images, you can easily download the images from the SteemPeak version of the post and then upload them to Steem. How long this takes depends on the file size of the images and the speed of your internet connection. My internet connection is quite slow but my image file sizes are small (i.e. smaller than 500 KB).
An alternative approach would be to contact the Hive Blog and Peakd teams and ask if they are willing to modify their apps to recognise images saved to Busy. I wouldn’t know how difficult this would be. I doubt it would be a priority for them even if it were possible.
The Steem/SteemPeak versions of these posts mean very little to me now as I no longer use Steem and these posts have next to no visibility, as they can only be accessed with the URL or a direct link and not from my Steem profile/channel pages.
Background to why I used Busy rather than Steemit or Steempeak
For those of you curious as to why I used Busy rather that Steemit or SteemPeak.
Prior to Economic Improvement Proposal (EIP), I wrote most of my posts using the busy.org Steem user interface. I choose busy.org because of the upvote from the busy curation team. Their upvote was often my second highest upvote behind my self-vote. Almost all the other upvotes I received were very small, as most of the major stakeholders either were selling votes or had delegated their Steem Power to bots and other passive income earning initiatives. I rarely used Busy to curate content. I used either Partiko (mobile DApp) or SteemPeak. About a month after the implementation of the EIP, I switched to posting on SteemPeak. I continued using SteemPeak until I switched to the Hive Blockchain where I use PeakD, which is an improvement over SteemPeak.
Links to updated posts
Since I took the effort to update the pictures in my Busy posts, I thought I would share the links to several of my favourite posts from that time; see below.
Trade, money, debt, waste, and power
Time Travel – Multiverse and Avengers Endgame
Technology – Curse or blessing?
Less jobs vs less working hours – Further discussion about efficiency and technology
Economic Concepts #11 – Externalities
How often do you want to succeed?
Prejudice induced discrimination
Ideas for profit sharing with Steem DApps
Creating my own style with my PNG images
I think these posts still contain valid content even though they are over a year old.
More posts
If you want to read any of my other posts, you can click on the links below. These links will lead you to posts containing my collection of works. These 'Collection of Works' posts have been updated to contain links to the Hive versions of my posts.
My New CBA Udemy Course
The course contains over 10 hours of video, over 60 downloadable resources, over 40 multiple-choice questions, 2 sample case studies, 1 practice CBA, life time access and a certificate on completion. The course is priced at the Tier 1 price of £20. I believe it is frequently available at half-price.
Future of Social Media
I created a utility for blog image backups called SteemYaLater and I planned on making a service that will download all your blog images but I never got around to it.
https://github.com/anthonyadavisii/SteemYaLater
This can be helpful to prevent loss of your images in the future
This is a great tool. Thank for sharing!
No problem. It's not perfect it did get the job done for me and a few others that I offered to do. The challenging part was the various image hosts w differing requirements. Was def not a one size fits all situation.
Now, as @spectrumecons mentioned, could be a possibility of creating a service w HDF funding. Could potentially leverage decentralized content hosting solutions like SiaCoin Skynet or IPFS to make a more cost effective option.
I understand the going rate for Skynet is $2/TB/month or somewhere around there (or was it $1, I forget) which I understand is cheaper than AWS which I know Steemit had used.
However, this would be something that would avail app owners more than the general population at its surface. This is because the "paying the bill" is generally not transparent to the user.
I upload images to hive blog all the time and I def wonder if with their revenue model it is sustainable.🤔
I just checked. It is $3.29 Storage/TB and $1.15 Bandwidth/TB
Even before the Hardfork, images occasionally disappeared from blogs. There are some reliability issues with image storage. I can see how providing permanent storage for millions of images can be problematic. Some image files can be quite large as well. These images can be compressed so the backup version could be considerably smaller than the original upload. I'm not sure the extent of the loss of quality. Anyway, I hope you are able to find time to revisit your project. Eventually, you might even be able to fund it with Hive Dao.
I used Busy for the vote as well. I am seeing people use Ecency (old Esteem) and get a vote like they used to do when it was Esteem. I am thinking about writing with that and see how it goes. Every try that recently?
I downloaded Esteem a while back. At that time I was using Partiko for curation. I didn't use the mobile DApps for posting as I write my content on my computer.
Very useful post, @spectrumecons.
Thanks
Hi good afternoon🙏, Thanks for sharing informative post
I have seen the same problem when visitung some of my old articles. I have fixed a few of them. For many cases I don't even remember what the images that were used to begin with. I'm happy that you could fix up your blog and had the organizational skills ad prudence to keep the images around for the job 😃