This is a really nice post, very well cited and well written, and nice photography to illustrate it. That stretch of coast is really beautiful! Very interesting history you relate, and I liked that you tied it all back to Steemit/Blockchain with the discussion of how blockchain technology might finally put an end to the kind of inequalities that lead to smuggling in the first place. Happy to have found you - following!
My only constructive criticism would be to use a blockquote when you quote an extensive passage, as you do when quoting from the article "Smuggling is a crime created entirely by the government". I do realize that you put single quotes around those paragraphs to indicate that they were quoted from the source you listed, but single quotes are pretty easily missed and that is a long section of this post that is a direct quote. You can use HTML to make blockquote by enclosing text in these opening and closing tags:
<blockquote>
YOUR QUOTED TEXT HERE
</blockquote>
or you can use Markdown to make a blockquote by just bracketing your text with single greater than symbols like so
> YOUR QUOTED TEXT HERE
>
Here is what either of those methods would look like - you can see how the vertical bar to the left of the text and the lighter gray color of the font makes it much more obvious that it is a quote:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.
Again, great post and super happy to have found you! Following - cheers - Carl
Thank you so much for your reply and positive response! awesome of you and super helpful, I will definitely use <blockquote. Perhaps you could point me in the right direction in regards to learning how to arrange text to be beside an image or is it simply a case of googling basic HTML coding for layouts or something like that, have found it a bit confusing! thanks again!
Steemit uses "markdown" which is quite a bit simpler than HTML, but you can also use (some) HTML. There are a number of good Steemit markdown tutorials I am sure if you just Google "Steemit markdown tutorial" you will see a ton of results. I personally mostly use HTML to format my posts but that is only because I am very proficient in HTML already. Cheers - Carl