The Guardian's best specialist British weblog of the year

This site has been named as the best specialist weblog for 2003 in the Guardian’s second annual “British Blog Awards”. There’s also a full list of of winners and more about the awards.

Comments

• N Janet Gyford on Thu 18 Dec 2003, 12:25pm

  Many congratulations from a proud mum and dad !

• N Henry de Jong on Thu 18 Dec 2003, 01:49pm

  Congatulations, well deserved Phil.

• N David Quidnunc on Thu 18 Dec 2003, 03:21pm

  Good for the Guardian to recognize what the rest of us already know!

• N David Quidnunc on Thu 18 Dec 2003, 07:17pm

  Nothing much interesting in the “Internet Magazine” squib on the Guardian award, but isn’t this an intriguing headline:
  “A call girl tops the blogs with Samuel Pepys”
  http://www.internet-magazine.com/news/view.asp?id=3888

• N Pauline on Thu 18 Dec 2003, 09:10pm

  Congratulations, Phil! And to Sam, too.

• N Nix on Thu 18 Dec 2003, 09:51pm

  Damn — our secret is out!!!

  More congratulations, and a multitude of thanks, Phil.

• N Ed LeZotte on Fri 19 Dec 2003, 01:14am

  I read the Gardian online first thing every morning and spotted it — what a happy suprise — and you certainly do deserve it. Wonder what Sam wold have thought about it all?

• N cheska on Fri 19 Dec 2003, 02:02am

  Bravo Phil!!!; thanks to SP for his very entertaining & more diary; and a big thankyou to Phil’s mum & dad, too… ya did good!

• N Bradford on Fri 19 Dec 2003, 02:17am

  “Oh frabjous day! Calloo! Callay!”
  We* chortled in our joy.

  *the “entranced” company
  

• N David Quidnunc on Fri 19 Dec 2003, 05:45am

  Anticlimactic mention in CSM

  After the Guardian award, this mention of the site in today’s (Thursday’s) Christian Science Monitor of Boston, Massachusetts is small potatoes, but it’s a nice helping:

  He says Phil’s creation is “a site which will almost certainly become the most comprehensive example of the first-person historical account available on the Web. … The only question now is, can you commit to 10 years of regular visits?”
  — “Diary of Samuel Pepys and EyeWitness,” by Tom Regan
  http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/1218/p25s01-stin.html

• N ajr on Fri 19 Dec 2003, 01:59pm

  Can we commit?! Of course. Congats to all!

• N Barry Reich on Fri 19 Dec 2003, 03:09pm

  Congratulations from a lurker who now requires a dose of Pepys to start each day.

• N Brian G McMullen on Fri 19 Dec 2003, 04:53pm

  Phil, Congratulations on a well deserved award.

  You have provided us with a look at ourselves through a looking glass almost four hundred years old. Drinking bouts at the alma mater, bureaucracy run amok, a dalliance here and there, and will those workers ever leave.

  So normal and so special.

  Happy Holidays!

• N Stephen Moyse on Sat 20 Dec 2003, 01:28am

  Vancouver Island here:

  Excellent melding of forms.

  I am looking forward to a source that can send me automatic-once-a-day Pepys entries (or does it already exist beyond my modest skills on MacX-plus-Safari?).

  I can smell Mr. P’s coffee, so to speak.

  Kudos, kudos!

• N PHE on Sat 20 Dec 2003, 09:54am

  Well done Phil & Sam!

• N helena murphy on Sat 20 Dec 2003, 11:22am

  Congratulations Phil and season’s greetings to you and your family from Helena Murphy.

• N Zeneca on Sat 20 Dec 2003, 10:44pm

  Sam, I think would be chuffed & hooked on daily re-readings of his own diary -I think he would particularly like the hyperlinks and annotations and chuckle where contributors mis-interpret part of the diary. A great use of the internet - thanks Phil - checking out the latest entry is now a fun part of my day as for a few minutes I escape into 1660.

• N language hat on Sun 21 Dec 2003, 04:13am

  I’ve been here since Jan. 1 and am looking forward to staying for the duration. Definitely a well-deserved award, and I add my thanks for the site!

• N Lawrence on Sun 21 Dec 2003, 11:28am

  Well done Phil, a well deserved award, I only discovered this site in November but have spent many happy hours going over earlier entries, and looking forward to the next Days.

• N Grahamt on Sun 21 Dec 2003, 12:57pm

  Very well deserved.
  Congratulations Phil. As long as you keep publishing it, I’ll keep reading if I am able.
  A Merry Restoration Christmas.

• N Eric Walla on Sun 21 Dec 2003, 09:34pm

  What Phil?! You had to ENTER?!

  I thought they’d present you with the award by general acclamation. Although it may have gotten a little dicey once Sam went into workman-watch mode. As exciting as watching paint dry …

  On to the New Year!

• N Laura K on Mon 22 Dec 2003, 02:20pm

  Bravo! A well deserved award if ever there was one.

  Like our esteemed Language Hat said above, I’ve been here since January and I’m in for the duration.

• N Mary Cooley on Tue 23 Dec 2003, 01:32pm

  Further congratulations from another lurker who needs her Pepys shot in the morning.

• N dirk on Tue 6 Jan 2004, 03:02am

  Also from the Guardian:

  An interesting, maybe somewhat controversial article!

  I can’t think of any other place to put it, so here it goes:

  “We’re a passionate, brutal bunch”
  by Tristram Hunt - Monday January 7, 2002
  http://www.guardian.co.uk/britain/article/0%2C2763%2C628743%2C00.html
  

• N debra on Mon 12 Jan 2004, 10:44pm

  More from the Guardian (Review section, Saturday 10 January):
  In an essay on diaries Susan Hill says that she never got to grips with Pepys until she “stumbled upon the entries put up daily by that public benefactor Phil Gyford, who has made Pepys the subject of his blog. Gyford will put a daily entry from Pepys’s diary on his internet web-log until the whole is there in 10 years’ time. Reading the entries on the internet, just a page a day, has given Pepys an immediacy, a freshness and an excitement it failed to have for me in book form. The medium has revealed the message.”
  Ms Hill also quotes William Plomer’s introduction to the diaries of Francis Kilvert – he says that a diary’s effectiveness is “likely to derive from a special blend of honesty and appetite for life that gives the power to record everyday happenings while magically freeing them from banality and triviality.” Something that is certainly true of SP, I think.
  You can read the whole article here: http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1118965,00.html (The bit about Pepys is near the end.)

• N Sam P on Wed 14 Jan 2004, 10:49am

  Just wanted to add my heartfelt thanks, PHIL - and also to the company of annotators who take this diary into a new dimension! I generally just observe, usually because I am catching up a few days at a time, so am invariably behind the discussion. This diary and site has opened up a whole new context against which I view “today”! THANK YOU ALL - and THANK YOU SAM for your commitment & discipline in recording your life for us to “share”.