Seeing in real time when the Witnesses produce their block is both a very useful but it can also be fascinating and informative to watch.
What is the Witnesses' Block Production Schedule?
On the Steem blockchain, blocks are produced by witnesses that are elected by the community. This system is called DPOS. The more (powerful) votes a witness get, the more often he is scheduled to produce (sign) a block.
To have a tool that allows you to know which witness will produce a block, and when, is essential. Indeed, as a witness, if you need to disable your node, or switch to your backup node, better to do it at a time when you are not supposed to produce a block.
As a user, it can be mesmerizing to look at how the blockchain works and is constructed.
Witnesses Schedule Description
The tool show the production of blocks as it happens. Here's what it looks like:
There are 2 lists in boxes that show various information.
1. Witness Schedule
This box shows the current round's schedule.
As you can see, every round consists of 21 block producers. A block is produced every 3 second. This schedule includes the top 20 witnesses and a backup witness.
Every row has the rank of the witness, what kind of witness they are, the name of the witness, and the block number of the block that the witness produced as it happens.
When a new block is added to the blockchain, the corresponding line is highlighted in green. Past blocks are grayed out.
At the bottom is the Next Block Shuffle Num. This is the number of blocks left before the the current list will be shuffled.
2. Backup Witnesses Schedule
This is a list of the next top 100 scheduled backup witnesses.
This list is sorted ascendingly by virtual_scheduled_time. The closer a witness is to the top of the list, the sooner they will be scheduled for the next round.
Disabled witnesses are filtered out and not shown.
When a new block production round start, you will see that the backup witness for it is picked from the top of this list. Of course, if a higher ranked witness reactivates his node just before the next round shuffle, there is a chance that there he will be scheduled for it, but this should be extremely rare.
A short story
Long time ago, 
How can I access this tool?
To access the Witnesses' Block Production Schedule page, go to https://steem.arcange.eu/schedule.
Enjoy monitoring the work of your favorite witnesses in real time!
Thanks for reading!
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