Changelog

What’s new on Castlemap

A small atlas, kept honestly: every user-visible change lands here, newest first. It is run by one person building in the open — AI does much of the heavy lifting, a human decides what ships. Corrections are welcome.

Follow via feed: /changelog/feed.xml (Atom)

18 July 2026 — “Ink & Bone” — a calmer, more human look

• The whole site moved from the launch palette (dark navy + amber gold) to ink, bone and verdigris — closer to an antique sea-chart. The honest reason: readers whose taste we respect said the old colours looked machine-made. They had a point.
• New favicon and social-share card to match, rendered from the live dataset.
• This changelog page, with an Atom feed at /changelog/feed.xml.
• The all-castles index was rebuilt for scanning: a country grid with flags in place of a run-on link wall, columned category lists, and an on-page contents line.
• The same treatment for castles by country and tidier action rows on the ranking pages — and on the map itself, “All 2,400 castles” is now a proper button, so the browsable atlas is one obvious click away.
• The display face changed from Cormorant Garamond to Fraunces — a warmer, wonkier old-style serif — completing the redesign the palette began: headers on every page, the map included, now carry it.
• The site header gained the castle mark, the wordmark settled on a single colour, and the content pages grew wider — prose keeps its reading measure while grids and tables breathe.
• Country chips now set a deliberate country code (ENG, SCT, WLS and NIR included) instead of emoji flags, which rendered differently on every platform — and the Netherlands got its missing NL back.

15 July 2026 — Honest sitemap dates

• The sitemap now re-dates a page only when its content has actually changed, instead of stamping every page on every deploy — kinder to crawlers, truer to the word “lastmod”.

14 July 2026 — German edition, phone ergonomics, a data fix

• Full German mirror at /de/ — the map UI and all 2,400 castle pages, with German Wikipedia content where it exists (about 84% of landmarks).
• Proper iPhone / touch ergonomics across the map and every page: safe-area insets, bigger tap targets.
• Data correction: Jaigarh Fort’s founding year (1726 — Wikidata carried −1000), plus an override list so future data refreshes keep audited fixes.

13 July 2026 — The most famous castle in every country

• New page: one national champion per country, ranked by fame — the Palace of Versailles comes out world #1; the 131 champions span fame ranks #1 to #2,120.

12 July 2026 — Statistics, embeds and an MCP server

• /statistics/ — citable castle statistics computed from the dataset: country league tables, density and per-capita leaders, founding centuries.
• An embeddable, chromeless version of the map at /embed/, free to put on any site.
• An MCP server at /mcp, listed in the official MCP Registry — AI assistants can query the atlas live.
• The dataset mirrored to GitHub, Hugging Face and Kaggle, and made citable with a Zenodo DOI.
• Unknown URLs now return a real 404 instead of the map shell.

11 July 2026 — Stories, fame and free data

• Every castle page gained its story — the lead of its Wikipedia article, with attribution.
• A fame ranking of all 2,400 landmarks at /castles/ranked/, blending Wikipedia coverage with real readership.
• The free dataset page at /data/ — GeoJSON and CSV, CC0.

10 July 2026 — 2,400 landmarks across 131 countries

• The atlas grew from its launch size to 2,400 castles, fortresses and palaces — Japan fixed, the UK split into its four nations, and a Ruins category (97) added.

9 July 2026 — Launch

• Castlemap goes live: the world’s great castles, fortresses and palaces on one interactive night map, each with a photo, founding century and its own page.