Something went wrong when I posted my last entry about the Clark County Wetlands. I'm writing this post, therefore, to redirect my readers to view that post via Ecency rather than at this site.

https://ecency.com/engrave/@davidmajk/wetlands

I would also encourage them to bookmark this alternate site for all of my blog entries in case there are future snafus here. Ecency has a more rudimentary look than Engrave, the host of this site, which I chose for its handsome templates, but it's a worthwhile backup.

https://ecency.com/@davidmajk/blog

If all you want to do is read the last post, you can stop here. If you're wondering what the heck I'm talking about – Ecency? Engrave? alternate sites? – read on!

This blog is administered on the Hive blockchain (I will assume anyone reading this far knows what a blockchain is). The public face of Hive is a suite of decentralized applications (dApps) through which you read and write content saved to the blockchain, and interact with users and content producers on the blockchain. Engrave, the dApp which powers this dBlog site, is one of them. Ecency, the dApp through which I initially registered my user name and joined the Hive community, is another. Both are social media applications. Others may be oriented toward gaming, decentralized finance (DeFi), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), or anything else developers may create. You can explore the current ecosystem at https://hive.io/eco.

Hive is a pay-to-play platform. For example, you must pay to post content on the social media dApps. The intent is to discourage bots, spam, and other negative behaviors; bad actors generally do not want to pay for the "privilege" of behaving badly. When you post, comment, upvote, or perform any number of activities, you burn something called Resource Credit (RC). As I understand it (I have much to learn myself), RC regenerates automatically a little each day. If you are a relatively new user, have a low reputation score due to minimal use of the platform, or scant or negative interaction with other Hive participants (mine is currently 35 out of 100), or possess few Hive tokens (the native currency of the Hive blockchain), you have to wait a few days to accumulate enough RC to resume your activity.

So what happened with my original Wetlands post? An error message popped up when I clicked Publish. I don't recall what the message said, nor do I know why publishing threw an error. It showed on the Engrave (dBlog) dashboard that it posted, but it didn't show up on the blog itself (serendipity.dblog.org). I tried later to update (re-post) the entry, but the same error was thrown and it still isn't showing up on the blog. By this time, I had twice exhausted my Resource Credits and wasted several days.

Eventually, I discovered that the post was indeed saved to the Hive blockchain when I saw it via Ecency. I still don't know why it's not accessible from Engrave. I don't suppose a diagnosis would be possible without knowing the original error message. Is there a log out there somewhere? Is there some corrective action I can take so that Engrave can sync with what Ecency sees? I'll post an update if I ever find out.