More of a complete rebuild than a simple update. After years of shameful neglect, I have spent the last couple of months redesigning and rebuilding the Medieval Bestiary website. The old site was using outdated web technologies, which made it difficult to update and maintain. I had been putting off the needed work – and it was a lot of work – because I didn’t want to do all the programming. (I used to be a computer programmer. I retired. I didn’t do any programming at all for six years, and hadn’t planned on doing any more ever. Oh, well. It all came back to me pretty quickly; I guess doing it for 40 years embedded it in my brain.)

Anyway, it is finally done. The site now uses modern web technologies and has a sleeker, cleaner, better interface without a lot of the unnecessary frippery the old one had. There isn’t a lot of new content yet, but over the next few months there will be. Navigating the site is not radically different, so if you are a previous visitor you should not have much trouble figuring it out, but if you do there is a revamped help section to explain it all. Old links to the site pages should still work. There are links at the bottom of each page that should let you find your way if you get lost, and the improved search facility should let you find pages more easily. The new image galleries for the Beast, Manuscript and other pages display beast images in a way you are probably familiar with from other imaging web sites.

If you get garbled pages or sometimes get the old bestiary pages, your browser has probably cached an out-of-date copy of the page. You may need to force your browser to refresh/reload the page. In Firefox and Chrome you can do that by holding down the Ctrl/Cmd key and pressing the F5 key. For other browsers, check your browser help for instructions.

The old Medieval Bestiary is still available at https://legacy.bestiary.ca, for those of you waxing nostalgic. It will, of course, never be updated again.

You can leave comments here about things you like and things you don’t. If you find a problem, you can use the new contact form to tell me all about it.

Stay tuned – lots of new content coming “soon”!