About The Dog Codex

The Dog Codex is a public wiki-style register of domestic dog breeds. It is meant to read like a field guide left on a library table: warm paper, strong type, and encyclopedia copy rather than marketing blurbs.

Entries mix AKC groups and describe origin, type, temperament, energy, intelligence (typical trainability, not a ranking of the dog), coat and grooming, well-documented health notes, and ordinary care. Aliases (Lab, Westie, GSD, Frenchie) are indexed so a search can find a plate under the name people actually use. The home page and breed index lead with a trait finder: size, energy, intelligence, and group, combined with AND.

Editorial stance

This is a reference for curious readers. It is not a substitute for a veterinarian, a qualified trainer, or the standard of a parent club. Health notes list conditions that appear often in a breed’s literature; they are not a diagnosis and not a complete medical catalog. Individual dogs vary. Welfare-sensitive topics — brachycephaly, extreme angulation, merle-to-merle breeding — are named because they belong in an honest encyclopedia.

How the site is built

Volume I is a small Astro application on Cloudflare Workers, with breed records in D1. There is no account system and no CMS in this version: the seed data is the catalog. Breed plates use hosted Wikimedia Commons photographs (CC BY, CC BY-SA, or public domain), with a line-drawing monogram as fallback when a file is missing. Images are stored with the site; the register does not hotlink upload.wikimedia.org.

Photos

Plate photographs are copies hosted on this Worker, credited on each breed page as “Photo: author, license, via Wikimedia Commons,” linking to the Commons file page and the license. Only CC BY, CC BY-SA, and public-domain files are used.

The name

The future public domain is thedogcodex.com. It is not attached to this deployment yet. Until then, treat any workers.dev preview as a working proof, not the finished masthead on that domain.

Questions about a living animal still belong with a veterinarian who can see the dog.