Looking after your site

Sign in

You sign in to miow with a passkey: your phone or computer keeps it and unlocks it with your face, fingerprint or screen lock, so there is no password to remember.

1. The first time, open the invite link you were sent, type your name and press Save a passkey.
2. After that, go to miow.me/edit and press Sign in with a passkey.
3. Your sites are listed there. Open one to reach its owner page, where everything below is done.

On a new phone or computer, a passkey kept in iCloud Keychain or Google Password Manager is there already. If it is not, press Sign in with a passkey, choose to use a phone or tablet, and scan the code with the phone that has your passkey.

Lost every passkey? Ask another owner of the site, or whoever built it, for a new invite link. They make one under People on the owner page.

Get paid

Payments for products and donations go to the site's own account at Stripe, the payments company that takes the cards and pays the money into your bank. miow takes nothing.

1. On the owner page, find Payments and press Connect Stripe.
2. Sign in to Stripe, or make an account, and give the bank account to pay into.
3. Stripe sends you back, and Payments says Ready.

To change the bank account, sign in to Stripe and open Settings, then Payouts. To use a different Stripe account, press Use a different Stripe account under Payments, then Connect Stripe again.

Pay for hosting

Hosting is paid by card once a month. There is no invoice: Stripe takes the payment and emails a receipt.

1. On the owner page, find Hosting and press Pay for hosting.
2. Give your name, email address and card on Stripe's page. The first month is taken then, and each month after on the same date.

To change the card, see receipts or cancel, press Manage payment under Hosting. If a payment fails, Stripe tries again and emails you. Should hosting stay unpaid, the site is paused a fortnight later: visitors see a notice, nothing is lost, and paying puts it back at once.

Put the site on your own domain

Until then the site lives at its miow address, such as yourbusiness.miow.me.

1. On the owner page, find Your own domain, type the domain, such as yourbusiness.com, and press Use this domain.
2. miow lists a few records, short lines of settings, to add where you bought the domain, on its DNS settings page. The owner page says how, step by step, with a button to copy each value.
3. The owner page says Live once the domain works, from a few minutes to a few hours later.

To change to a different domain, press Remove domain, then add the new one.

Read your messages

What visitors send from the site's contact form arrives on the owner page, under Messages, newest first. Nobody else sees it. Press Reply to answer by email, or Delete once you are done with it.

See who visits

On the owner page, press Stats, under the site's name. It shows how many people visited, which pages they read, which sites sent them, and their countries and devices, over the last day, week, month, three months or year. The foot of the stats page says what each figure means.