Hello and welcome to Steemit! Voluntary charity is a beautiful thing. Kudos to you and your spouse for doing all that you do. Do you still practice law? I have a brother-in-law who is an attorney. As a PI in Virginia, people have recommended that I take the Law Readers path to becoming an attorney. It is not my passion though. I'm most interested in residential security.
There are a ton of other webpages to help you with Steemit. Here are some of the best for beginners:
https://steemd.com/ (This site is used to keep track of your voting power and other stats. You do not want to run out of voting power, and you only get so much per day. I keep my voting power around 80% for example.)
https://steem.makerwannabe.com/ (This site will tell you who follows you, who unfollows you, and who mutes you. It is great for meeting new people too. I regularly check it to see who has followed me to see if I should follow them back.)
https://steemit.chat/ (This site is the official chat webpage for Steemit. There are Discord channels too, but I usually stick to the official site. Come in to network and meet new friends. You can directly message people there too, so it makes it easier to communicate with your closest friends.)
Oh yeah, there are a lot of bots on here. If you see a cookie cutter reply, especially to your intro post, it is almost certainly a bot. Check the account's reputation. If it is low, I would recommend just ignoring them. Everything is public on Steemit, so you can go look at an account's comments and replies. Are they all the same? It's a bot.
Adding photos to your account as a new Steemian may be confusing at first too. The easiest way it to click to "Submit a Story." Once in there, use the built in Steemit tool to upload an image from your computer. Below the posting window, you will see "Insert images by dragging & dropping, pasting from the clipboard, or by selecting them." Click on the blue text. Once the image is uploaded, you can copy and paste the link into your account settings.
Verifying your identity is very important because it will get you more support and people will trust you more. The best way to verify is to link back to your Steemit account by using another public social media account. For example, I posted my Steemit articles from here through my Twitter account. Another person posted their Steemit information on their Facebook account. Some people will even post a video of themselves writing out their account information since that cannot be Photoshopped. The more famous a person is or the more valuable their content is, the more important it is that they verify. If a new account falls within those two categories and fails to verify, it may get blacklisted.
Again, welcome, and I've followed you! If you have any questions about getting started, look me up on the chat site.
Hey @finnian. I can't thank you enough for all of the great advice! I have a quick question. I'm trying to make my second post right now and the blue post button won't allow me. When I hover over it, it says "post as waynegill." I'm not sure what that means and why my post won't load. Everything is in there; text, images, etc. This seemed to work perfectly and easily last night when I made the introductory post. Not sure what's happening now. Any ideas? Thanks in advance - will definitely follow back.
Oh and P.S. - Follow your passion. Law is a tough gig without a real passion for it. Tks
Wayne
Also, it just allowed me to post this reply to your post, but not an original blog post. Not sure what I'm doing wrong. Wayne
The post issue could be bandwidth. If you have low Steem Power, you will not have much bandwidth. I would also copy and paste the text of the post out, save the title and tags, and delete it all. Close steemit.com, and log back into it. That might reset any bugs. It's still in beta but usually posting works.
Hey @finnian - Please ignore my previous comment about not being able to post. I figured it out - I was placing hashtags in the wrong place. Lol; with all your tips above, I will conquer this! Wayne
Awesome! I'm glad the issue was resolved.