I’ve been working for about six weeks on Orthocal.info, and I wanted to round up all the changes into one post rather than leave it unannounced. Most of this is stuff you’ll notice the moment you open the site; some of it is invisible unless you go looking. A lot of this was made possible by Claude Code. Here’s the tour.

Full support for the Greek/Antiochian tradition

This was the big one, and it took the better part of a month. Orthocal has always followed the OCA’s practice for fasting, readings, and commemorations — which is standard for most Slavic-tradition parishes, but not what you’ll hear read from the analogion in an Antiochian or Greek Archdiocese parish. On a good number of days, those traditions have genuinely different readings, different fasting rules, and different saints.

You’ll see the result as a small Slavic/Greek toggle at the top of the readings and calendar pages. Flip it, and the readings, the fast, and the saints for the day all switch to match. It’s the product of a lot of careful cross-checking against antiochian.org and goarch.org along the way.

Two new Bible translations

The readings page now offers a translation picker. Alongside the King James Version, there’s:

• LXX2012 + WEB — a modern-English pairing where the Old Testament comes straight from the Septuagint (the Greek text the Church has always used, rather than the Hebrew Masoretic text most English Bibles translate from) and the New Testament is the World English Bible. This is now the site’s default, since it’s the only option here that actually matches the Old Testament content and versification the lectionary itself is built on.
• Douay-Rheims — the Challoner revision, translated from the Latin Vulgate. It reads a bit older and more formal than the WEB, and some readers just prefer it.

Both are public domain, and both came from the same place all the other translations here do (eBible.org).

Find a saint by name

There’s a new search page that lets you look up a saint directly instead of hunting through calendar dates. Building it helped to unite multiple story entries that had never been linked to the same person. Stories and commemorations for Athanasius and Cyril of Alexandria, Nicholas of Myra, several of the Theotokos’s own feasts, the Three Holy Hierarchs, and more were linked together. The page for the Theotokos is perhaps the best example.

A redesign, and a dark theme

The readings page got a real redesign: Scripture Readings and Commemorations side by side (stacking on narrow screens), a compact list of the day’s readings up top that jumps straight to the full passage, and cleaner segmented-control toggles for tradition and calendar instead of radio buttons. There’s a responsive hamburger menu for mobile now. The site also picks up a dark theme automatically, following your system preference—no toggle to hunt for, it just adapts.

MCP Server

An MCP server (/mcp) now exposes the calendar and saint search as tools an AI assistant can call directly—if you use Claude or another MCP-aware assistant and want to ask it “what’s the reading for tomorrow,” that’s now possible.

That’s the roundup. If you use the site and something looks off—a reading that doesn’t match your parish bulletin, a saint on the wrong day, anything—I’d genuinely like to hear about it. A lot of what’s in this post started as exactly that kind of note.