About this site

This site is a presentation of the diaries of Samuel Pepys, the renowned 17th century diarist who lived in London, England (read more about him). A new entry written by Pepys will be published each day over the course of several years; 1 January 1660 was published on 1 January 2003.

If this is your first time here, you may want to read the the story so far, the frequently asked questions or some information about the text. You can also read the site using RSS, receive diary entries by email or follow Pepys on Twitter. If you want to post your own annotations you should also read the annotation guidelines.

This site is run by Phil Gyford. I'm happy to answer what questions I can (email me at phil [at] gyford [dot] com), but if you have a question about Pepys or his times you may be better off asking the knowledgeable people on the discussion group. If you want to talk about topics that aren't directly related to Pepys, then the social group may be for you.

Some of the Encyclopedia topics feature descriptions written by users of the site and their guidelines for doing this are here.

Technology

The site is built around Movable Type with some additional custom code. There are five Movable Type weblogs:

The Diary

All the entries of the diary are entries in a weblog with a little tweaking to work better with the diary's old dates. The "Also on this day" items are stored separately in a MySQL database and displayed with PHP.

The Encyclopedia

Every topic in the Encyclopedia is a separate entry in a weblog, organised into a large number of categories. Some entries include content from Wikipedia which is fetched and cached locally using PHP. Some entries include Google Maps which are displayed using Mapstraction. The latitude, longitude and zoom levels are stored in Movable Type using Custom Fields. The larger maps are also from Google, with additional PdMarker code, and the pages are generated using PHP to extract the location data from the Movable Type database.

In-Depth Articles, Site News and The story so far

These are all straightforward Movable Type weblogs.

The Recent Activity page is an aggregation of the latest activity from all the Movable Type weblogs.