Daily entries from the 17th century London diary
I’m afraid I’ve had to stop the Recent Activity page from updating again. The database queries that make these listings are very slow and they’re holding up other features of the site, such as posting annotations.
I’ve tried various alternative methods of making these lists but seem to keep coming up against the fact that the database is a bit low-powered to perform actions with the number of annotations we’ve accumulated plus the many spam annotations that get caught. So I’m looking into moving the database to a more powerful server and will hopefully have things up and running again before too long.
Thanks for your patience!
Be the first to comment | Permalink | Thursday 2 February 2012 | Housekeeping
I had a brainwave about how the Recent Activity page is generated and it seems to work. The page is now re-created every five minutes and seems to do so without keeping the database occupied for ages like it used to. Fingers crossed it’ll keep working like this from now on.
There might be occasions when it lists fewer recent things on the page, depending on the distribution of where annotations are… but it’s certainly better than nothing.
(For the technically minded and interested… Previous versions of the page required joins between the database tables holding annotations and entries, and this was too much for the shared server to cope with without making temporary tables etc. In the most recent previous version of the page, this was taking a few minutes for each of the page’s four lists, and prevente any other queries on the annotations table (such as posting a new annotation). I realised I could get much the same data without any joins, and this takes seconds. Much simpler!)
Be the first to comment | Permalink | Friday 3 February 2012 | Housekeeping
I’ve just added a new section to the site, for letters to and from Samuel Pepys. It currently lists a selection of letters between Pepys and the era’s other major diarist, John Evelyn.
These letters, along with their footnotes, are taken from Guy de la Bédoyère’s website with his kind permission. That site has been linked to at relevant points during the diary, but it seems a good idea to have them all on this site too, with links to all the Encyclopedia references.
They make for interesting reading, in particular the different style Pepys uses in his letters to others compared to that in his private diary.
We also have quite a few letters that were exchanged between Pepys and various correspondents from later years, but they won’t appear here until after the diary ends, to avoid spoilers.
1 comment | Permalink | Friday 10 February 2012 | New features
In case you like to keep an updated version of the Pepys Family Tree to hand, I’ve just made a couple of small updates to it. I’ve added Babs and Betty, daughters of Roger Pepys, and his new wife, Esther (all over on the far right). I’ve also added Elizabeth Pickering’s 1668 marriage to John Creed, which had gone unrecorded.
As ever, let me know if you have any corrections or additions for it.
3 comments | Permalink | Monday 13 February 2012 | Housekeeping