Steemit Archive Test - What I Did, and What I Learned

"The ... building blocks of [Steemit], depend on each other for security, immutability and longevity..."
- Steem Bluepaper -

We're not all developers, not all programmers.

But Steemit dangles the promise of "security, immutability and longevity" for items that are actually saved and stored on the Steemit blockchain.

Employing the Steemit blockchain as a file archive...
Image courtesy of Gerd Altmann and http://pixabay.com

Unless you're a blockchain programmer,

that Steemit benefit only applies to text saved on the blockchain.

But what if you want to save an important image? A rare photo of your grandparents, for instance? Or a sound—e.g. a recording of your child's first words?

Sorry! If you can't programmatically access the Steemit API, then you are simply SOL.

But wait! Maybe not...

Most email programs turn files into text.

That magic is called "Mime 1.0," a story in itself for another time. Suffice it to say that I thought I'd try using my handy Thunderbird email program to see if I could (fairly) easily turn a file into text and preserve it, with it's incorporated format and image, permanently on the blockchain.

Here's what I did:

I used OpenOffice to edit an RTF file that contains an image and a font that I like, formatted just the way I want. When it was all done, I exported it as a PDF file to "lock in" all the details.

Unfortunately, that file turned out to be too large for Steemit. One thing I learned is that the Steemit edit window rejects files that exceed 64K bytes in size. This lead to the discovery of https://smallpdf.com/, a website that will optimize and shrink the size of your unwieldy PDF files.

After iterating a couple of times, I had a PDF that (when embedded in an email) was small enough for a single Steemit post. I attached that to a very short Thunderbird email, and sent it to myself.

After receiving the email, I opened it and did a "Save As" to store it on my desktop as an individual file.

PDF and email, Side by Side... ~ Original Image by Hive account@creatr

Next,

I edited the email file as Plain Text in order to strip off all unnecessary email header information. (I changed the file extension from '.eml' to '.txt'—over the objections of my operating system, of course).

How much and what did I have to strip away, leaving enough for Thunderbird to still recognize this as an email? You can see the exact text in my first experimental post, here: Experimental Steemit Blockchain File Archive Test.

In order to preserve the simple text of that upload, I sandwiched it between a <code> and a </code> so that Markdown would show it as plain text.

I'll display just a snippet here—the header and the first line of MIME 1.0 encoded file data—so that you can see the literal details. Note that there are three lines in the header in which I had to replace a plain leading space with the special string " " in order for this to work.

<code> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/mixed;  boundary="------------E012B2B96ED92D02BBC23510" Content-Language: en-US

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
--------------E012B2B96ED92D02BBC23510
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

Steemit file preservation experiment

Original to Steemit, "Old Hands"

--------------E012B2B96ED92D02BBC23510
Content-Type: application/pdf;
 name="handy.pdf"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Disposition: attachment;
 filename="handy.pdf"

JVBERi0xLjQNCiXi48/TDQozIDAgb2JqDQo8PA0KL0xpbmVhcml6ZWQgMQ0KL0wgMzczNzYN
...
CiUlRU9GDQo=
--------------E012B2B96ED92D02BBC23510--
</code>

The blockchain has a long memory.
Image courtesy of Andrew Martin and http://pixabay.com

Check my original post,

and you'll see that there were no changes at all required in the rest of the file.

Finally,

after it has been stored on the blockchain, I open the Steemit post, and then highlight and copy the complete MIME text into a plain-text file.

I then change the file extension from .txt to .eml, open it with Thunderbird, and save the attached PDF file...

Voila! I have the original PDF file restored! :D

You can archive your own (small) files the same way.

You don't have to be a programmer or developer; all you need is attention to detail and careful editing.

If you go back through this article and follow the links, you should be able to find all the tools that I used and repeat the process for yourself. Then your Steemit blog can become a long-term archive for more than just your words.

Let me know if you have any questions; I'll be glad to help you repeat my experiment for your own nefarious purposes.

When I have some time,

I hope to continue these experiments . I want to see if there may be a simple way to split and preserve a larger image, or maybe an MP3 file across multiple Steemit posts.

_FIN

All articles in this series to date:

Experimental Steemit Blockchain File Archive Test
Steemit Archive Test? What's He On About?
Steemit Archive Test - What I Did, and What I Learned

P.S. If you have an "in" with anybody at Steemit, Inc. - Would you please ask them to get rid of these damn, extremely annoying "off-website" arrow/boxes? The have, overnight, made Steemit ugly. There are much better solutions.

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Thanks for your time and attention.
You are why I'm here on Steemit!
I have very eclectic interests and hope, over time, to write about them all.