MeowCat messaging system
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Official MeowCat blog
New look and feel
If you look at MeowCat today, it may look different. That's because I've changed the font from Lato to Ubuntu. (both available from Google Web Fonts, BTW).
In the longer term I'll be making more changes, using Twitter Bootstrap as the framework for the HTML.
Users can now preview their messages
If you write a new message, or reply to someone else's message, you'll notice a Preview button at the bottom of the screen. This allows you to preview your message before posting it.
What's special about MeowCat?
In the short term, MeowCat aims to have a series of features that make it as useful as sites like Twitter, Wordpress, Tumblr, etc, with maximum ease of use, and with the data (posts) available to see in multiple views.
In the long term, MeowCat's goals are more ambitious:
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It will allow Anonymous public communication, so that anyone can say anything and the authorities won't know who said it.
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There will be multiple public and priovate MeowCat servers, and messages will be passed between them using a flood-fill algorithm (like Usenet). This will make it resistant to censorship
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Like facebook, MeowCat will allow private communication. But messages won't be stored on any central server, merely on each user's own PC. Messages travelling over the internet will be encrypted. This will allow Secure private communication.
I'll change the CSS so that monospaced text doesn't apear in yellow.
Added feature -- sharing MeowCat messages on other services
In pages showing a single message, I've added buttons at the bottom of the message so you can share them on various social media sites.
Initially the sites supported are: facebook, Twitter, Google+, Reddit and email.
Go to the single page for this message and try it out.
Added features
I've just added some features to the system
It doesn't do encryption at the moment. It will do that once I add private messaging.
Here's how it will work:
You'll have the MeowCat client software on your computer. It'll have a web-based user interface (it's a website running on your PC). You write a private message, to me.
The software gets my public key, uses that to encrypt the message, and sends it.
I'm running the MeowCat client at my PC. When the message comes in, it is automatically decrypted at my end. I can then see the message in clear.
Part of the intention of the MeowCat private messaging client is that it will replace web-based messaging services such as gmail.
One of the reasons I developed MeowCat is that I find Twitter and Wordpress irritating to use.
When I want to write a new Wordpress message, the web page takes 17 seconds to come up. With MeowCat it takes less than one.
So what's this? A tweet? A blog post? A discussion forum entry?
All three
Do people respond? In threads?
The thread for this conversation is here
What's it written in?
Python & Django.
Where's the code?
At some point it will be open sourced.
There's no reason why #MeowCat couldn't do that as well, of course.
There will be; this is on my list of features to add.
New font: Lato
I just changed #MeowCat to use the Lato font now, instewad of whatever the browser defaults to.
Do you like the changes?
One thing I'll be working on is features to make #MeowCat a really good blogging platform. These will incolude automatically pushing MeowCat messages out to facebook, twitter and other platforms.
BTW you can also say #Rugby League.
Esto es el primer mensaje
It's actuall the 14th. But it's your first.
Types of messaging system
Messages can be either public or private, depending on whether they are intended to be visible to everyone, or only a few people.
At the moment, MeowCat only deals with public messages.
Later it will include features for handling private messages as well.
It's important that private messages stay private. To ensure this:
- when messages are sent over the internet, they will be encrypted
- private messages will not be stored on MeowCat's central servers, only on the senders' and recipients' computers
If you send a private message on Facebook or via gmail, there's a copy of it on Facebook's or Google's servers, and governments can ask for it.
Governments can ask MeowCat for private messages but they won't get them, because MeowCat simply will not have that data.