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Good afternoon Steemit Dev Group and especially to @steem.history who's welcome is always appreciated.

Having mentioned that I'd created this profile when I first started investigating Steemit's codebase, it makes sense for me to use it for the day-to-day activity that I undertake trying to give Steemit a sexy new interface. I can then share less frequent and perhaps more substantial updates via @the-gorilla.

In my more recent post, I outline what I consider to be my next steps in this project - the creation of a Proof of Concept (POC).

This POC will be to take a free, off-the-shelf HTML / CSS template and use @steemchiller's API to populate it. The main reasons I've decided upon this approach are two-fold:

1. An off-the-shelf HTML / CSS template will be quick to populate and can demonstrate a fresh interface quickly.
2. I can contact @steemchiller if I have any questions or don't understand anything within the API.

If the POC is successful, then the next stage will be to write a proposal to the Steem DAO in the hope of getting Steemit support. Although there's no guarantee that this financial support will be available, it's a risk that I'm willing to take at this stage.

Step 1 - Machine Set Up

Ok, so this is fairly unexciting but I've got a new(ish) laptop that I've not used for coding yet - I've been too scared to set it up and migrate my previous projects over.

Historically, I've installed Apache, MySQL and phpMyAdmin separately but this time, I've opted to install WampServer in the hope that it'll be quicker.

Initially, it was quicker and after plenty of fiddling, I've been able to get everything set up using Visual Studio Code as my editor as opposed to my rather outdated version of Macromedia Dreamweaver 8. To put this into context, Macromedia hasn't existed as an entity since 2005.

So joyously, I can share with you the standard check that things are working - "Hello World!" (without the exclamation mark - that can be bug 000000001).

Step 2 - The HTML / CSS Template

An obvious starting point for this (for me anyway) was a Google search for "Free HTML / CSS Templates for News" and I got some very sexy example templates. Despite these websites focussing on the first, and to me most important word, "Free", when it came to downloading the template, they had to be purchased. Which I found rather annoying.

So after much searching (and I mean much), I found 2 options, neither of which are the design that I had in mind but both adequate for a POC and available from https://html5up.net/ FOR FREE.

Option 1 - https://html5up.net/minimaxing
Option 2 - https://html5up.net/editorial

So they're both downloaded and eagerly awaiting me. I'll let you know how I get on in my next update...