The short version: the site now has a diary going back to March 2024, three practical guides written because I needed them, and an about page that says plainly who pays for the food and what hasn't been done yet. It's in Portuguese, English and Polish. There's no team and no sponsor, which is the whole point.

Some of you have been reading these articles for months, which means you've read a great deal about a cat you've never seen.

So this one is an invitation rather than a lesson. tugathecat.com has changed quite a bit since I last mentioned it, and the new parts are the ones I'd actually point a stranger at.

1. The diary now goes back further than the site does

The Diário is the part I'd open first. It's 25 entries, newest first, each a date, a photograph and a short piece of text — and it runs from March 2024 to late October 2026.

March 2024 is before Tuga. That entry is her mother, by the hedge, photographed because she was there and I had a phone. Tuga arrives in June 2025, about two weeks old, in a cardboard box with a saucer. Then: the first snow, the willow tree, the green jumper, the syringe feeding, a year later, the shelter, the straw.

You can filter it by Tuga or by Amigos da Tuga — the garden colony — because they're genuinely two different stories. One is a cat who ended up on a sofa. The other is six to eight animals who eat here every evening and will not let me touch them.

The most recent entries are the shelter sequence from this autumn, including the one where I worked out the shelter was on the wrong side of the garden entirely. That story is the opening of the other article I published today, if you want the Bitcoin version of it.

2. Guides, written out of necessity

There's a new section, Guias, and the honest framing is in its own subtitle: these aren't articles written at a desk. Three of them:

Found a kitten — what to do in the first 24 hours. The one I needed in June 2025 and couldn't find written down clearly anywhere.

Street cats in winter: food, water and a warm place. Water freezing is the problem nobody warns you about.

Building a shelter that survives the winter. Materials, insulation, why it goes on blocks, where it faces.

If you've got a colony near you, or a cat has recently decided your garden belongs to it, these are the pages I'd read. They're free, there's no signup, and there's nothing to buy on them.

3. An about page that says the awkward parts

Sobre is the page I rewrote most carefully, because an about page is usually where a project starts lying to itself.

It covers where I'm from, how this started, and the bit most cat websites skip: what sterilisation has actually been done and what hasn't. That's an uncomfortable section to write. It's also the only honest way to talk about a colony — trap-neuter-return is slow, expensive, and the gap between what should be done and what has been done is real.

It also says who pays. Nobody sponsors this. There's no company behind it, no team, no content calendar meeting. It's one person in a Polish village who's from Porto, a cat who runs the house, and a colony that tolerates him at a distance.

4. Kitty, and three kittens

The newest cat on the site is Kitty — black, I'd guess about three years old, arrived in September. She eats like she expects the supply to stop, which, in her experience, it probably has.

In early October it became clear she hadn't arrived alone. Three kittens, roughly a month old at that point.

That's the whole reason the shelter arc happened this autumn, and the reason there's now a styrofoam box with a roof on it sitting in the middle of the garden looking much worse than the proper one nobody uses.

5. How the site pays for itself, stated plainly

Two mechanisms, both disclosed on the site itself, and I'd rather you heard them here than noticed them later:

Amazon affiliate links, in one section — the food I actually buy, the beds, a toy, the outdoor camera. If you buy through them the site earns a small commission at no extra cost to you. If you'd rather not, don't; the content doesn't change.

Donations. There's a Lightning address with a QR code, and Ko-fi for anyone who'd rather use a card. The suggested amounts are in cat units rather than money, which tells you the scale we're operating at: 1,000 sats is a meal for the colony, 5,000 is a day of food, 21,000 is a week of clean litter.

It goes on food. That's it. There's no runway, no roadmap and no token.

6. The uncomfortable half

This article is an advertisement, and you should read it as one. I've written eighty-odd pieces insisting you ask who benefits from the information you're given, and today the answer is me. The affiliate links pay me. The donations pay for food I'd otherwise pay for myself. Applying my own standard: discount accordingly, and judge the guides on whether they're useful rather than on my telling you they are.

The site is also not finished, and parts of it are thin. The English and Polish versions exist and I'd like you to tell me where they read badly. The supporter wall I promised still doesn't exist. The diary should be weekly and the most recent entry is from late October, which is not weekly by any definition.

And the two halves of this project sit together more awkwardly than the branding suggests. Cats and Bitcoin are joined because they're both mine, not because feeding a colony teaches you about monetary policy. The analogies in these articles work because cats are a good lens for explaining things, not because there's a deep connection I've uncovered. I'd rather say that than let the metaphor pretend to be an argument.

What the site is for is simple enough: somewhere the photographs live, somewhere the practical stuff is written down for the next person who finds a kitten, and somewhere the colony has a record. If any of that is useful to you, it's at tugathecat.com.

Twenty-five entries, three guides, one cat who runs the house and six to eight who won't come near me. Nine lives, zero leaks. 🐾⚡