Thomas brought some Dixit cards to a cafe here the other day, but they ended up being only two by the table. Is it possible to play Dixit with only two persons? How can it be done?
Thomas didn’t even have a working smartphone nearby, so he asked himself… how can I play Dixit with only two persons? Is there a working method or way to play the game that will work with only two persons? He came up with an idea, and he was actually quite satisfied with the result.
How to play Dixit with two persons?
How to play Dixit when you are only two persons?
The solution is to hand out 5 or 6 to both players. The first player looks at all his cards and finds one for which he finds a describing word. He then selects two or three other cards that he adds to the selected one and places them on the table.
The other player now has to pick the card the first player described with the first word he said!
There is no good way to decide who is the winner in this game, because you can easily trick the other by selecting stupid words… but if the goal is to have fun with a kid or someone you love and you do not really count the points, only play to have fun, this can actually work quite well!
Have you ever tried to play Dixit with only two persons? How did you play? I would love to hear your thoughts!
Thomas is writing lots of articles that he wants to have published at different times. But, when he sets an article to be published at 12.00, it is often published one hour later. How come? What time system does WordPress run with?
Thomas once tried to help someone to have an article published at exactly 00.00 on New Year’s Eve, wishing everyone a happy new year. But, it turned into a major bummer, because the article was published at 23.00 instead. What caused this? How can Thomas make sure it will not happen again?
Fix the time zone of your WordPress installation
Thomas has found a way to solve this problem once and for all. To do so, he goes to Settings and chooses General in the WordPress menu. Under General Settings he can find an option which is called “Time Zone.”
Above you can see a picture showing what this is like. First, you can see that the time zone is set to UTC +0, and beneath you an see what this actually means when it comes to the time of the given WordPress installation.
If Thomas lives in a country which is UTC +1 and Thomas sets an article to be released at 12.00, it will be released at 13.00 in his local time, because WordPress will publish it at 12.00 UTC +0 time. The easiest way to fix the trouble is by changing the time zone so that it will reflect the time zone you are in!
Thomas is a bit confused, but at least he understands how it works. He will not fail again if he tries to publish something at exactly 00.00 on New Year’s Eve, that is for sure!
Have you written a WordPress post that you would like to publish another time and another date? Is there a way to publish a WordPress post at a special time?
Thomas likes to do a lot of work before he is going on holiday and before the weekends. Now he would like to write some blog posts that are to be published during the Christmas holiday, but he doesn’t want to actually work during the Christmas holiday. So, how can he schedule blog posts using WordPress to that it will publish the articles during the holiday?
Schedule posts with WordPress
Thomas was very happy to notice that publishing WordPress posts at a given time and a date was very easy, at least as he found out how and where to do so.
How is it done?
When Thomas has finished writing the actual article, he goes to the “Publish” box on the right side of the blog post itself. You can see it on the picture beneath.
If you see the picture above, you can see the arrow pointing at the “publish” text. It is set to immediately at the moment, but if you press edit, you can easily set the time and date for the article to be published.
If you want to have the article published on December 24th at 18.00, it will look like this.
The post is set to be published on December 24th at 18.00
Now all Thomas has to do is to press the Schedule button (earlier Publish was written, but since the article is set to be published in the future, the text has now changed to schedule).
That is how easy it is to schedule an article for a future release in WordPress! And, since Thomas uses SteemPress to publish his article to Steemit, this will also help him out schedule articles for future release on Steemit!
Thomas wants to include a widget in his WordPress blog showing his latest Steemit posts. He has earlier managed to do this on Medium, but is there a way to include a Steemit RSS feed on his blog?
Thomas has been looking for a method for this quite some time, but he has only read about a tool that hasn’t been working for months, and thus, it hasn’t been any good option available. But, then, in the middle of October 2018, he suddenly discovered a tool that is working and that will let him access his Steemit RSS feed, which again makes it possible to show his latest posts on Steemit on other sites. He can also use the tool to access other people’s and user’s RSS feeds, making it even easier to see the latest blog posts on Steemit from his favorite writers.
Thomas has found a way to include his Steemit feed in his WordPress blog
Thomas finds his Steemit RSS feed
To get access to his RSS feed, Thomas has to visit www.steemrss.com. It is very important to include the “www” if not, the page isn’t working. There are two sorts of feeds you can access using this tool.
“www.steemrss.com/@<username>/feed” This will show Thomas what is going on in the feed of username.
“www.steemrss.com/@<username>/blog” This will show Thomas the latest posts from username.
“www.steemrss.com/new/ethereum” This will show Thomas the latest posts in the category Ethereum.
This tool is working perfectly, and Thomas is really happy. And if you visit www.thethomasstories.com, you can see the widget in his sidebar showing the latest posts Thomas has made on Steemit.
Thomas is very thankful to @philipkoon for creating the tool, and of course to @doriitamar for contributing to the work!
Thomas just read an article on Steemit that he really liked, and now he would like to bless the author with an extra tip.
The truth is, Thomas has already given the article an upvote. But, since he only has 50 SP it doesn’t even bless the author with 0,01 USD. So, what can Thomas do to bless the author with an extra tip in addition to his upvote?
There are a few ways in which it can be done.
How to give tip to an author on Steemit? – Pixabay
Giving someone a tip on Steemit
Thomas first tried to use a voting bot to upvote the article of the author. But, the money was returned, since voting bots will only let you pay for upvotes on your own articles. What is the solution then?
Manually transfer funds to the author
You can visit your very own wallet, and then click the arrow next to Steem or Steem Dollar. You can then pick transfer. Set the amount you want to send, type the name of the author, and write a message saying thank you for the article or something like that. It can look like this.
Manually transfer a tip to an author on Steemit
Use the TipU bot to send a tip
There is another method, and it is a really handy one. There is a voting bot named TipU, and with this, you can both pay for an upvote on your own articles, but also send a tip to other authors you like.
It works in a similar way as the transfer above, only this time you send the funds to @tipu, and in the memo, you include the URL of the article you want to bless.
Sending a tip to @adonisabril for his latest article on Steemit
Now it will take a few moments, and soon the article will receive an upvote from @tipu. Not only will it receive an upvote, but TipU will also add a comment since it has been sent as a blessing. In this case, the comment from Tipu to the article looked like this.
Thomas has just sent his first tip on Steemit, and he is happy that he could support the work of a great author like this one. Maybe he will tip more authors in the future, and maybe he will receive a tip from someone who might like this or some other article in the future? Who knows!
Thomas is a big Steemit fan, but for a while, he had a hard time understanding one thing… why does the value of an upvote change after the vote has been made?
After seven days, the value of your post will never change again!
Thomas is sometimes using voting-bots to give his articles more attention and a higher income. But, it was once when he paid for an upvote that he suddenly noticed that the upvote was worth 2,5 USD at first, and then the next time he watched, the value was only 2,40 USD. What happened? Why did the value of the upvote suddenly change?
Since then Thomas has also experienced the value change to a higher value. What is going on?
Thomas theory on the matter
There are for sure people in the Steemit community that knows this much better than Thomas but based on his studies, this is what you should know.
The value can only change during the first 7 days (before payout). After that, the value will be stuck and never change again.
The value of an upvote is based on the Steem price. In other words, if you get an upvote worth 2,5USD, but then the price of Steem drops within the coming minutes, hours, days, this will also impact the value of the upvote you received.
This is the answer Thomas gives to himself on this question. Have you asked the same question? Do you have the same answer, or do you have another answer to the same question?
Thomas has been writing some articles on Steemit, and he feels addicted to the platform. But, to gain even more audience, he has decided to use some voting bots to turn “Hot” or maybe even “Trending.” But, he isn’t sure about whether or not it is worth it.
Thomas once visited DTube, and there he noticed that you can see the actual value of every single upvote as you press the upvote button. Or, you might not see the value of all the upvotes, but at least the most valuable upvotes. Now Thomas wants to find something similar for Steemit, as he wants to know whether the upvote bots give as much back as he pays for their upvotes.
See the value of Steemit upvotes
Let us say that Thomas pays 3 STD for an upvote using an upvote bot. Now 75% of the “income” goes to the author, while the rest is normally going out as curator fees. That means the value of the upvote of the bot should be at least 33% higher than what you pay if it is supposed to be a 0 project. If he wants it to be a plus project, it should be even higher. And considering that Thomas often uses SteemPress (which takes 15% of all income), it would be great if the upvote had even higher value.
Right now Thomas doesn’t care so much about the mathematics, he is simply interested in finding out whether or not there is a way to see the value of an upvote on his article and videos. And yes, he has found a way.
What Thomas does to see the value of Steemit votes
Whenever Thomas has written an article and he wants to see the value of the votes coming in, he visits SteemPeak. There he checks his own profile and hovers the mouse over the heart, and at once he can see the value of the upvotes on his article.
Thomas can now see the value of Steemit upvotes on his articles.
He uses this frequently to check out the value of different votes, and he is happy about the service. SteemPeak has several other useful functions as well, but Thomas hasn’t looked deeply into those yet. Maybe some other time.
Thomas is now getting a thorough overview of the value of the upvotes of bots and actual people reading his article. He finds it useful and he is very happy!
Thomas is writing his stories at www.thethomasstories.com, but it can take Google weeks to index his content. What can he do to make those lazy bots index his articles faster?
Thomas is a quite patient guy, at least if he gets what he wants right now. He never wants anything for Christmas, because at the moment he discovers that he is in need of something, he has already ordered it from Amazon, eBay, or AliExpress. He is a guy that gets things done, but he isn’t always understanding when other people delay his work… like Google does when they do not index his articles at once!
Thomas is extremely fed up with Google
Can you imagine? Thomas wrote an article about an event that took place a few days after the article was written. He came up with information about the event, where to park your car, ticket prices and more. But, nobody visited the article at all. Thomas felt like he had wasted his time, and he quickly understood why… Google hadn’t indexed the site, and it was impossible to find it in the search engine. What is the solution for Thomas?
In his despair, Thomas has found a solution! This is what he has done to make Google index his articles (normally) in a few minutes.
What Thomas does to make Google index his articles
He has added a sitemap of his website in the Search Console.
Now he finds the URL of the article he wants Google to index.
He clicks on “Crawl” and then “Fetch as Google.”
He adds the URL of the article he wants Google to Index and presses “Fetch.”
He now clicks “Request Indexing” and follows the instructions.
The article should be indexed by Google within a few minutes/hours.
Thomas has found out that this works almost always. But, there is one exception. Thomas started to doubt this method as he noticed that several articles didn’t get indexed at once, and it could take days, even when he used the method.
What to press to make Google index your articles quickly!
But, Thomas believes that he understands what the keyword is… quality content!
Google indexing and quality
The times when it has taken Google days to index his content is when the quality of the content has been very similar to other websites online. The articles didn’t say anything that hasn’t been said before, and for that reason, the Google bot made a decision to put the article on hold for some days, as those looking for information can find all the information of the given article in other articles online anyway.
Now Thomas is ready to publish this article. He has worked a lot on it, and he has even prepared a little YouTube video with the instructions. After publishing, he will follow his very own instructions from this article, and then he will update this article to tell you how long it took Google to index the article.
Time from publishing to indexing by Google: 2 minutes
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Have you still got questions? Use the comment field!
Thomas is getting popular on Steemit, and people mention him in articles and comments here and there. But, Thomas doesn’t get notified when he is mentioned on Steemit. What can he do?
He is looking around for different solutions, and luckily Thomas managed to find two. Since then he has discovered even more Steemit tools that will help him find out if he has been mentioned somewhere, but these are still his favorite tools at the moment.
Now Thomas will find out if you mention him on Steemit
Thomas is using Busy.org This is a Steemit platform that has a different layout, and it includes several new tools. One of the most important is the notifications window in which you can see if you have been mentioned/tagged, and also if someone re-steem your posts.
Notifications on Busy.org
Thomas is using SteemWorld.org Here he can simply add his username and he will get notifications whenever someone follows him, mentions him, and lots of other stuff.
Get Steemit notifications at SteemWorld
Thomas is using Partiko on his mobile Besides these, there is an application named Partiko that can be used on mobile devices which does the job in a very good way.
Now Thomas is happy. Whenever someone mentions him on Steemit he gets a notification, and he can easily cope with all the comments and articles mentioning him.
Thomas has just installed Steem Press on his WordPress blog. From now on new posts will be published on Steemit automatically. But, is there a way to publish old posts as well?
Thomas is a happy and enthusiastic blogger. But, he loves spending his time wisely, and now he is looking for a way to publish his old WordPress posts to Steemit using SteemPress. It is great that the new posts will be published automatically after installing SteemPress, but what about the old posts?
Thomas has thought about the topic for a while, and he wonders if he should delete his old posts, copy the content, and then republish them all over again. In that way, the posts will be published to Steemit, and at the same time exist on the old blog like before. It could work, but it is not a very efficient method. Thomas isn’t happy with the solution.
Thomas gets ready to delete some old posts
While waiting for a better solution to show up, Thomas starts looking through some old posts. He wants to delete a couple of them, and that is when Thomas discovers an amazing little text.
Wow – I can publish to Steem from the post overview in WordPress!
While looking for something else, Thomas suddenly discovered the text “Publish to Steem” in the post overview. Here he can simply select old blog posts and press “Publish to Steem,” and the posts will be published automatically.
There is a maximum of one post per five minutes, so Thomas quickly discovers that it will take a while for all his posts to get published, but it is still a very efficient way to publish old WordPress posts to Steemit.
At first, the article doesn’t seem to get published. That is when Thomas realizes that he has set a delay for posts to be published on 2000 minutes in the SteemPress options. He decides to keep it this way, but at least he understands why the articles aren’t published on Steemit right away.
Thomas is very happy, and he looks forward to seeing his new and old blog posts on the Steemit platform.
