Firstly the response to KittenAuth has been IMMENSE! The kind people (look to the right now) that have donated have helped me an amazing amount by allowing me to fend off the evil bandwidth bill that will be heading to me at the end of the month.
Just to sum up some of the craziness that’s been going on surrounding KittenAuth:
- We started off with Digg who gave us 1197 “diggs” (to date)
- In the first 48 hours this site got 4.2million hits (requests not visitors)
- I gave an interview with Mike Magee of The Inquirer and that’s been published.
- It’s been on the “popular links” section of b3ta twice now
- 3 days after publishing we had 335 Google results for “kittenauth”
- Today there are “about” 18000!
- I’m sorting out links with KittenWar and PuppyWar for source images for everyone.
- We even got a mention by the great Bruce Schneier
Crazy! Just crazy! Ok so the plan from here is to take this idea, improve it with the suggestions and re-make the result in a form that everyone can use. I’m currently laying the groundwork for a PHP version that will suit most people if they want to implement it in their blogs. I’ll then backtrack and rehash my aspnet version.
Everything is starting up on KittenAuth.com (well my cat is guarding it for the time being) and I’ve made a buggy PHP version of KittenAuth that you can have a look at and test. It already implements some of the suggestions and should be a lot harder to hack - but currently just as easy to fluke.
I’ll be the first to admit that I hate PHP. I could rant on all day why I believe its a kindergarten language but that’s not the point of this.
Because of my vast ineptitude with PHP, I’m asking for help with this project. If you would like to help, please use your real email when you reply to this and state that you would like to help. Nobody apart from me will see your email address. I’ll then email you back in a few days with details of my subversion hosting. And we can launch things off with a good discussion on what we’re trying to do.
A public version should be available shortly after that.
One final note: Your donations really do make a big difference to me, however small (apart from the $0.11 one that Paypal demolished in Paypal-charges), so if you do have a spare dollar sitting in a paypal account that you’re not going to use, please consider giving it to the kittens =) They’ll love you forever. Thanks again to the kind people that have donated already and thank you in advance if you’re going to donate.
Update: The Register just covered us: Miaow to kitten-based authentication