I recently started making non-fungible tokens, (NFTs) on the Ethereum blockchain. There’s a whole ecosystem for them, and most of the tools / sites that let you interact with them are visual-heavy. That makes sense; Cryptokitties and Punks were some of the first examples of NFTs, and the image is a key aspect to both.

The artist in me loves it! But the author in me has issues. There’s a description field to tokens, and most sites dedicate only a small percentage of the screen to them.

I want to publish NFTs of words, but not images of words (there’s already a project that creates things like ‘word’ in black text in the middle of a white square…), no I want to create an NFT of a story. And why not? people at one time decided to do something crazy and take that oral history and write it down. This isn’t that much of a stretch; stories are put in books, so why not take that digital file and put it into a digital item?

Well, reading it would suck, because of the very limited area granted to the words in an NFT by most marketplaces.

So I started a project (I have too many projects, but whatever), and I’m calling it TokenScope. Eventually, it’ll be super duper with web3 to actually let a user interact with their own token, but for now, it’s only displaying data from a public API. It still does some very cool things though, including render Markdown into HTML for display. I have a version that works but isn’t pretty up on the site, and I’ll start making it pretty for my launches.

I tested it, and it works. It pulls the data and displays markdown like nicely stylized HTML. The meat of it is some javascript I slapped together (I don’t really know much javascript), and I’m going to open-source at least that for now–and hopefully everything later.

So, that’s the plan. Stay lean and make what I need to make what I want. I think it’ll be helpful to the community too, but at least it’s helpful to me!