You don't need to run a local instance of steemd at all unless you a) want to mining or b) are doing something else that is useful

I have forks of Hive account@jesta's steempress and a fork of steemit.com on my public Github so I can submit fixes and run my own experiments.

For steemit, I edited the README (and updated the example config) to make it clear you don't need to run steemd at all. The relevant section is:

You now have your development front end running at localhost:3002, connected to the main public steem blockchain. You don't need to run steemd locally, by default you will connect to ws://node.steem.ws. Use your regular account name and credentials to login -- there is no separate dev login.

Piston is a command line tool, it also ships with an "experimental" steemd node you can connect to.

None of those will help in building an up vote bot. I have this Python based autovote-bot bookmarked on Github but haven't attempted to run it myself. You do need steemd installed, which comes with cli_wallet. I don't fully understand that wallet part yet and haven't tried the automate-bot.

Probably best to attempt to follow instructions and get that running. Post issues on that Github repo if you run into trouble. I'll try and get that running at some point too, but won't get a chance likely until next week at the earliest.

Hope that loooong reply helps.