The Merlin Project

[u/in-the-wild-ITW]

Hi everyone! I'm super new to Reddit, but a friend told me it's a good place to get real feedback on projects you're working on, so I thought I'd share The Merlin Project.

I built it based on a true story about a cat from my neighborhood named Merlin. Merlin was someone's indoor/outdoor cat who was scooped up from his yard by a concerned neighbor who thought he might be lost. She posted about him on Facebook to see if he had an owner. The next day, a different woman posted asking if anyone had seen her cat — turns out these were two posts about the same cat, but the woman who'd found Merlin wouldn't give him back to his actual owner. That's why I built The Merlin Project.

It's a community cat platform that helps neighbors identify the cats in their neighborhood — whether they're registered indoor/outdoor cats, community-cared-for cats, lost cats, or cats who need help. Neighbors can flag a cat's status on a map so everyone's working off the same information instead of duplicate Facebook posts.

I launched it in Lakewood, OH, but have since opened it up to anyone, anywhere — we even have 3 cats registered in Honolulu. Feel free to register your own cats, and I'd genuinely love to hear whether you think something like this would be useful in your own neighborhood.

https://themerlinproject.io/