08/08/2026
Project44.ca has been completely rebuilt!
We moved the entire site off Squarespace and onto a platform we own and control. Every page, every photo record, every storymap, every article, all of it rebuilt from scratch.
What's better right now
The site is fast. Pages are pre-built as plain HTML instead of being assembled on the fly by a page builder every time someone visits.
Every page generates its own social preview card. Share a photo record or a storymap in a group chat, on Facebook, or in Discord, and it shows the right title, image, and description for that page, not a generic sitewide thumbnail.
All 88 old URLs redirect automatically. Old bookmarks, old links, old search results still land where they should.
Everything lives under one roof. Storymaps, records, articles, the store. No more separate sites for separate things.
What this is actually for
The bigger reason we did this is discovery.
Right now, if you want to find something specific, you go to the map, land on D-Day, and start digging. That works if you already know what you're looking for and you enjoy the sifting. Plenty of people do, and that's not going anywhere.
But most people arrive with one question. A grandfather's regiment. A single battle. A town their family came from. Making them excavate 150,000 unit positions to find it is a bad way to answer that question.
So the plan is that records live on the website itself, as real pages you can find in a search engine, link to, and read. From there, you go to the map already at the right place and the right time. You navigate to the subject, and the map opens where it should, instead of the other way around.
That part is still in planning. What shipped this week is the ground floor it gets built on. It wasn't possible on the old platform, and now it is.
Which map you're getting
Every map link on the new site points to map.project44.ca, the free public map, no account needed. That's the one for everybody.
Patreon members: the beta is still at beta.project44.ca. Keep using it. Nothing there has changed.
We're aiming to take the new map out of beta soon, and when we do, all of this converges. One map, everyone on it, linked from every record on the site.
What hasn't changed
The archive is free and stays free. 150,000+ unit positions, 15,000+ war diary pages, 232 geotagged photographs, 15 nations. Normandy, Northwest Europe, and Italy, day by day. Every position traced to a scanned primary document.
Who paid for this
Our Patreon members did. Not metaphorically. The rebuild happened because a few hundred people chip in every month to keep the work going. The archive is free for everyone because they cover it.
If the project is useful to you and you want to see the record pages, the new map, and the rest of it get built, that's the way to help.
One ask
We ported everything and the redirects should hold, but there are 368 pages on the site and something has almost certainly slipped through. If you hit a broken link, a page that looks wrong, a photo that won't load, or anything that just seems off, tell us. Comment here or message us directly.
