New features

New ‘Recent annotations’ page

I’ve added a new page that lists the annotations posted to all diary entries and the People and Places pages. Ideal for those of you who like to keep up with what’s happening on the site!

Be the first to comment | Permalink | Wednesday 8 January 2003 | New features

Improvements to the site

I’ve made a few changes this weekend, some or all of which you may have noticed already…

• A reorganisation of some of the pages and sections, as indicated by the tabs and links at the top of the pages. The most noticeable being that the People and Places pages now live in the new “Background reading” section. This section will be needed for a forthcoming load of pages about other aspects of Pepys’ world… stay tuned!
• A search box. This searches the section you are currently looking at. If you do a search on this page for example, you’ll only be searching this Recent News weblog. By default only the entries are searched, but you can choose to include annotations too from the search page. Let me know if you notice any odd behaviour, as I’ve not had a chance to test this fully yet…
• The Recent Annotations page now lists the 30 most recent annotations on the diary and the layout’s been marginally improved.
• I tidied up some confusion relating to footnotes about Pepys’ cousin and his brother, both confusingly called Thomas. (Thanks David.)
• Added the number of annotations to each person and place on the People and Places index pages.
• I added some more People and Places pages: John Hunt, Elizabeth Hunt, Roger Pepys, Harper’s (a tavern), the Exchequer, Somerset House, London Bridge, The Strand, Aldgate, St James’s Park and Gray’s Inn.

3 comments | Permalink | Monday 3 February 2003 | New features

New Recent Annotations page format

I’ve been working on improving the Recent Annotations page format, as it was rather unwieldy. I’ve now set it so that rather than listing the last 30 annotations chronologically, it lists the last 10 entries ordered by whichever has the most recent annotations. I hope that makes sense! There didn’t seem much point in the previous listing where most of the comments were on the current diary entry. This way, it’s easier to keep an eye on new annotations appearing on older diary entries.

I’ve also worked out how to include the start of each annotation, which makes it a bit more interesting. I’ve changed the recent People/Places annotations list to the same format too (I’m trying to split this into two separate lists but haven’t worked out how yet). I hope you feel this is an improvement; let me know!

5 comments | Permalink | Tuesday 4 February 2003 | New features

The new Background Info section

No doubt you’ve noticed the new section by now. Hopefully it’s pretty self-explanatory. It’s a directory of pages each devoted to a specific topic. These pages can then be annotated with information or links to other sites. The information should stay rather more “current” than that posted to diary entries which tend to “fade away” as we move through the diary. The People and Places pages are now integrated into this section.

There are links next to each diary entry to all the top-level categories in the directory, and if there is anything mentioned in the entries that correlates closely with a Background Info page, I’ll link to it from there. But this probably won’t happen often other than with people and places.

The directory will need more categories and annotatable pages. So if you have something to add and you don’t think there’s a suitable place, let me know. It’s easier to add a new category than move an annotation that’s been added to an innapropriate category!

If you find any broken links or other strange behaviour, or if you think the implementation could be better in some way then feel free to email me.

17 comments | Permalink | Friday 14 February 2003 | New features

New things in the Background Info section

I’m often adding new categories here and there in the Background Info section but I thought I’d just mention a couple of bigger changes today. I’ve added a lot of new categories and pages in the Food and Drink category and I’ve split the Places category into some sub-categories to make it more manageable. Thanks to David for his exhaustive efforts in the former case! As ever, let me know if there’s anything else you think would be useful in there.

2 comments | Permalink | Wednesday 19 February 2003 | New features

A few new things…

I made a few little changes today:

• Altered the template used for the search results slightly so more results will fit on a screen.
• Added a list of the recently commented-upon entries in this Recent News weblog to the Recent Annotations page. Can regular readers think of anything else (annotation-oriented or otherwise) that would be useful on this page, as a one-stop-shop for viewing what’s happened recently?
• Added a list of the most recently added background items to the front page of the Background Info page.
• Changed the layout of the annotation forms slightly, to go along with recent improvements to the default Movable Type templates.
• Added an FAQ in an attempt to answer some of the questions I get asked most frequently about the site in general.
• Belatedly added background pages for William Prynne/Prin and Ralph and Sir Thomas Widdrington. (I won’t always mention when I add background items here, hence the new list mentioned above, but these characters have been the subject of recent discussion.)

1 comment | Permalink | Saturday 1 March 2003 | New features

Join the discussion forum!

In the past we’ve debated whether there’s a need for a more informal discussion space, aside from the diary annotations. While we didn’t reach a conclusion, I think it’s worth a go. There have been a number of off-topic annotations recently and I think we would all benefit from somewhere we can dicsuss things, or ask questions, that don’t fit anywhere else.

So I’ve started a Pepys’ Diary group at SmartGroups (it’s like Yahoo! Groups but less cluttered). It’s not a perfect solution but often “good enough” is perfectly fine. If nothing else, it’s a good first step.

You can view messages either on the site or via email and I’d encourage you to sign up if you can spare any time for more discussion. Hopefully we’ll be discussing how best to use the group to begin with.

I should say though that 95% of the diary annotations are fine as they are and I see the new group as an addition to, rather than a replacement for, anything on this site. See you there!

7 comments | Permalink | Sunday 27 July 2003 | New features

New glossary in Background Info

It’s been suggested before, but the need for it has become more apparent as the diary goes on. I’ve created glossary category in the Background Info section for words that are used reasonably often, that need explaining, and that don’t have a more suitable category. “Link boy” is the only entry so far, and if you think of anything else (in past or future diary entries), just let me know. It should help cut down on anyone having to explain the same things too often!

3 comments | Permalink | Monday 4 August 2003 | New features

New further reading section

The old Further Reading page didn’t allow anyone to post their suggestions to it, so we were ending up with book recommendations scattered through the annotations. I’ve now created a new Further Reading section in Background Info, so if you would like to recommend something that isn’t already listed, feel free!

If you want to recommend a book but can’t see a page that’s right for it, do email me and I’ll add one.

Be the first to comment | Permalink | Sunday 28 March 2004 | New features

The story so far is now up to date

The Story So Far section of the site is now up to date, providing a monthly summary of events in the diary. Hopefully this should help people who haven’t been with us since the start, who have to take a break from the diary, or those of us who simply need reminding of past events occasionally.

If you use RSS, and you don’t have time to read a diary entry every day, you might find the RSS feed for the Story So Far useful — every month a new entry will appear summarising the previous few weeks of Pepys’ life. I can’t promise this will happen the moment a month has ended, but I’ll be as prompt as I can! (There are also daily RSS feeds of course.)

Many thanks to Glyn and Dirk for helping me catch up with the story so far, and also to Laura and David for providing summaries of the early days of the diary. As ever, do let me know if you have any suggestions or comments!

Be the first to comment | Permalink | Thursday 22 July 2004 | New features

Pepys topic map

Kal Ahmed has been busy creating topic map of events in Pepys’ Diary. What is it? Kal takes the events of each day and transforms them into XML, a format that can be easily interpreted by computer programs. From this he’s generated web pages that, for example, show you when Sam sent and received letters, what plays have been mentioned, or what happened when he journeyed from Brampton to Hatfield.

It’s all quite complex and bewildering, but in a good way! There’s a lot of information to browse through and get lost in, and while it can be confusing its existence means it will be easier for others to write programs that do interesting things with this data. There is more explanation about the project, and I’m sure Kal would love to hear from you if you have any suggestions or want to offer assistance. Currently the data goes back to the end of June 1661.

3 comments | Permalink | Friday 24 September 2004 | New features

An imminent new feature…

Update: The first article has now appeared!

You might notice a few things around here have been tweaked. This is to make room for a new section of the site: In-depth Articles. This will, hopefully, be a home to occasionally essays about aspects of Pepys’ life or the world in which he lived. If you would like to write something that doesn’t seem to fit elsewhere (perhaps because it’s too long for an annotation or covers too many topics to find a home in the Background Info pages), either drop me a line or raise the idea in the discussion group. The first article will appear this week…

Here’s a rough list of the changes I’ve made to the site:

• The pages that were the ‘Background info’ section are now the Encyclopedia. This seems a more appropriate and specific name. Alongside this is the new In-depth Articles section.
• The Introduction from the 1893 edition of the diary is now linked to from under the ‘The diary’ tab at the top of the page, which seems appropriate.
• The Recent Annotations page is now linked to at the top of every page, as I suspect this is used quite frequently by regular users of the site.

• There is a new RSS feed listing recently-created pages in the Encyclopedia, and a feed for the impending In-depth Articles. Both are linked to from the re-jigged RSS/XML page.
• Just for good measure, I tidied up the Diary archive page a bit.

I hope that all makes sense and isn’t too confusing a change! There are many other things I’d like to do to the site, to make it even better, but my time is unfortunately limited so this will have to do for now! But despite that, do post a comment below if you have any suggestions for improvements or, especially, if you notice anything I’ve broken!

7 comments | Permalink | Sunday 24 July 2005 | New features

The plays Pepys has seen

As most readers are aware, I add new entries to the Encyclopedia section as we progress through the diary, as Pepys meets new people, visits new places, etc. Until now I haven’t included pages for all the plays he’s seen, but this was becoming an increasingly obvious omission. So I’ve created pages for all the plays Pepys has seen or mentioned so far and will keep it up to date like everything else.

So, if you have the urge to do a spot of research there are 54 plays there that you can have a go at annotating: histories, synopses, links to scripts…

3 comments | Permalink | Thursday 29 September 2005 | New features

Pepys’ household Encyclopedia entry

A. Hamilton suggested in an annotation that we could use a section in the Encyclopedia for information about the Pepys household. I’m certainly finding it hard to keep track of which servants are currently working there, for example.

So I’ve created a Pepys’ household section. As new servants are employed or old ones fired, I’ll try and keep the relevant pages updated, so we can always tell at a glance who’s working there. Let me know if I’ve missed someone (I’d forgotten about most of them already!).

If there is other household-related information we could keep track of or expand on, do post a comment below, or to the discussion list, or to me.

Be the first to comment | Permalink | Monday 5 December 2005 | New features

Google Maps in the Encyclopedia

Since the site started, most of the places listed in the Encyclopedia have had links to their location on Streetmap. I’ve now replaced these with a map from Google Maps which shows the location in the page, which is more convenient.

Here are two examples: The Tower of London and Mumbai. The maps work OK on my Mac, but I did have problems displaying the pages in Internet Explorer on Windows — please try and let me know, as hopefully it’s just my PC…

Also let me know if you find anything else invconvenient about it, or that could be better. There are many improvements I could make over time now this is working.

I should just thank Jonathan Stott for his PHPCoord code which helped me translate the Streetmap OS Grid coordinates into latitude and longitude, and the Mapstraction folks whose Javascript code made the mapping easier to implement.

And I haven’t forgotten about my plan to allow people to adopt Encyclopedia pages and write summaries for them — the mapping code was rather messy in there and I had to tidy it up before letting anyone loose!

10 comments | Permalink | Saturday 9 September 2006 | New features

Become a Pepys encyclopedia editor

Some time ago I raised the possibility of readers of the diary adopting pages in the Encyclopedia and becoming editors of them. I made a few changes to the site that made this possible, and a couple of press-ganged “volunteers”, Jeannine and Todd, have so far given this a try.

Being an editor mainly involves writing a summary of a particular topic, with particular emphasis on Pepys’ relationship to it. Another possible task is to tidy up and summarise annotations. So far none of us are sure how much this is possible or desirable — is it feasible to reduce long lists of annotations and use their information and links within a single more coherent summary written by the editor? Although this was my original idea it’s been more difficult than I imagined and it’s something we’ll think about as we progress.

So far we have three pages done as examples:

• Catherine of Braganza by Jeannine.
• Frances Stuart by Jeannine.
• Mathematics by Todd.

There is also a page of guidelines and instructions for editors, which should help give you a flavour of what’s involved.

If you’re interested in adopting an Encyclopedia page (and for the moment it’s probably best to choose only one), then have a browse and find a page that says (on the right-hand side) “This page is edited by Phil Gyford”, which is their default state. Email me the name of the page and I’ll create an account for you.

You might want to start by choosing a relatively minor person, place or thing for which there’s only a paragraph or so to say about it. There are lots of these and it would be a good way to get the hang of the process before deciding whether you want to take on more complicated topics.

We’ll probably discuss aspects of policy — such as the issue mentioned above of whether and how to summarise annotations — on the discussion list. If there ends up being a lot of this, and a lot of editors, we may start a new list, but the discussion list should do for the moment.

1 comment | Permalink | Tuesday 2 January 2007 | New features

New design launched

As you can tell, the site’s had a lick of paint! Everything should be working OK now, so if you come across anything that looks broken, or that doesn’t work as you expect, do let me know (and tell me which web browser and operating system you’re using).

I’d been hoping to redesign the site for most of last year but somehow 2006 zipped by and I only got started on the project when I had some work fall through over Christmas and New Year.

The site has grown a lot over the past few years and despite occasional tweaks I felt it was getting a little unwieldy and could do with some reorganisation. I was also increasingly dissatisfied with the design and wanted to spruce it up with a look that will hopefully see us through the years to come. There are one or two rough edges I’d like to sort out when time allows, but it’s 99% done for now.

Although I’ve rebuilt things from the ground up there are no new features yet — I’ve just reorganised and redesigned the existing material. However, I have several ideas for interesting new things to add, and this will hopefully be easier with the new site.

So, I hope you like it — let me know if I’ve unwittingly removed something you relied on!

51 comments | Permalink | Friday 2 March 2007 | New features

Site design updates

Thanks for all your comments on the new design. I’ve made a few changes based on what you said, as described below. If things look a little odd you may need to visit this file and click the Reload button in your browser.

• I’ve made the text at the very top of the page, to the left of Pepys’ portrait, a bit lighter, so hopefully it’s more readable for everyone now.

• I’ve made the main column on all pages slightly wider, and the sidebar slightly narrower.

• I’ve increased the space between the lines in the diary entry texts. This should help make it more readable without having to increase the text size.

• I’ve re-instated the email links for each annotator’s name which I accidentally left off when I launched the new design.

I hope that’s all helped make things just that little bit better, and thanks again for all your kind words.

25 comments | Permalink | Monday 5 March 2007 | New features

Get Pepys’ Diary by email

The most requested feature for the site has been to receive daily diary entries by email. It may have taken me nearly five years for me to manage this but, finally, it’s now possible.

To subscribe you simply need to visit the subscription form and fill in your email address. You’ll receive an email asking you to confirm your address and then you’re done. After a new diary entry is published on the site you’ll receive it by email. There are instructions for unsubscribing at the end of every daily email you’ll receive.

A couple of caveats… It could be a few hours after a diary entry is published that you receive it by email, so this isn’t the way to go if you want your daily dose immediately. You also won’t see any of the annotations by email, so you’ll still have to visit the site if you want those. If your email client is fairly modern (accepts HTML email) then you’ll still get links to Encyclopedia pages within the diary entry (this works fine in Gmail for example); otherwise you’ll just see the text with no links.

The email process is handled by FeedBurner, where all this site’s RSS feeds now live, and has worked for the past week while I’ve been testing it, but let me know (below or by email) if you experience problems.

1 comment | Permalink | Saturday 13 October 2007 | New features

Temperature and politics

I have added a bit of extra contextual information in the sidebar next to every diary entry. You can now see:

• The average temperature for that month (daily data isn’t available until 1772) as recorded by Gordon Manley of the Royal Meteorological Society. You can view the full dataset on the Met Office’s website.

• Links to the relevant daily Journals for the House of Commons and House of Lords from British History Online. These will hopefully give some context to Pepys’ more political activities.

My thanks to Terry Foreman for finding both these sources of information that help bring Pepys’ world alive. If anyone can suggest anything else, do let me know.

7 comments | Permalink | Sunday 28 October 2007 | New features

Encyclopedia now including Wikipedia content

I’ve now added the ability for some pages in the Encyclopedia to automatically pull in relevant content from Wikipedia.

What does this mean in practice? It means that several pages will featurea an extra tab containing text and images from a page at Wikipedia. For example, the Royal Exchange page has content from this Wikipedia page and George Monck has been fleshed out thanks to this page. Some of the Wikipedia images will also appear in the right-hand column whichever tab you view on an Encyclopedia page.

Hopefully this helps expand the information we have in the Encyclopedia, and the inclusion of these pictures will bring things to life a bit more, with very little work on my or your parts. Occasionally the images might be slightly irrelevant — for example, photos of the Royal Exchange building that replaced the one from Pepys’ time — but hopefully that won’t cause too much confusion.

This isn’t intended to replace any efforts by the volunteer editors (and you can still volunteer). The Wikipedia text will provide a good general background on a topic, but editors can write something that’s more directly relevant to the world of Pepys. See, for example, Jeannine Kerwin’s piece on Sir Edward Mountagu.

I’ve only added the Wikipedia text for a few topics at the moment, and will work my way through everything else gradually. It will mostly be people who were prominent enough to deserve Wikipedia pages, and places that are well known enough. The are some topics with Wikipedia pages that it might not be worth including. For example, I’m not sure there’s much to be gained from using content from the Wikipedia page on wine on our own wine page as it’s of such a general nature. But I’d be happy to hear your opinion.

Anyway, I hope this adds to the usefulness of the Encyclopedia and makes the diary even more interesting!

2 comments | Permalink | Sunday 4 November 2007 | New features

Hundreds of Wikipedia pages now included

As I mentioned a couple of months ago I’ve been adding Wikipedia content into the Encyclopedia pages. I’ve now looked through the 2,797 Encyclopedia pages and 535 now feature Wikipedia content.

If you notice anything on these pages that looks obviously broken, do let me know. Some things may be unavoidable, because the text and HTML can change at any time without me knowing, but hopefully it should mostly work.

Also, if you come across a Wikipedia page that should be included on a corresponding Pepys Encyclopedia page, do let me know. Here’s a rough guide to the rules of thumb I developed:

• Places, particularly London streets and towns outside London, don’t feature Wikipedia content, even if it exists — the Wikipedia content usually focuses on modern-day information which doesn’t seem very relevant. Similarly with most food and drink.

• I’ve checked almost all the people in the Encyclopedia, although I soon realised that there was little point checking any women, as they so rarely feature in Wikipedia from that time period. Titled men are nearly always included of course!

• I didn’t check ships and taverns. Very few, if any, of these seemed to feature in Wikipedia, so I ended up not bothering. Let me know if you find any famous enough to have their own Wikipedia page.

So there we go — hopefully that will help us make sense of who people are over the next few years.

3 comments | Permalink | Sunday 30 December 2007 | New features

New contextual pop-up help

I’m not really sure what to call this. Tool-tips? Hover help? Anyway, you should now notice something new if you hover your mouse cursor over any of the linked words in Diary entries. Here’s an example:

Most of these pop-up tips will only show the name of the person, place or thing mentioned, although even this is useful when Pepys isn’t very specific in the Diary entry itself. But of the 2,875 Encyclopedia topics, I’ve written short summaries for more then 500 of them — all those that have Wikipedia pages associated with them.

This leaves a lot of links without decent summaries and I’d love it if any of you felt like writing one or more. Just email me the text and the link it should be associated with (eg, http://www.pepysdiary.com/p/150.php). Summaries should be up to 60 words and summarise the person, place or thing in a way that will be useful for the life of the diary. Where possible I tended to focus particularly on information around the diary person, such as how a person faired upon the Restoration. Also, I’m not attached to any of the summaries I’ve written so far, so if you feel you can improve on any, do email your versions to me at the usual address!

These tips won’t show up if you read the diary by email, or RSS. There’s also a bug that means the tip won’t show up in Internet Explorer on Windows if its link is at the very left hand edge of the Diary entry. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to fix that.

I hope you find these useful!

8 comments | Permalink | Thursday 27 March 2008 | New features

More “On this day” information

Some time ago I added the average monthly temperature and links to the House of Commons and House of Lords journals to the side of each diary entry. I’ve now added links to information at the Records of Earls Colne.

The site includes the diary of Ralph Josselin, the vicar of this Essex village, which have been posted in annotations here in the past. I’ve now added links from Pepys’ Diary pages directly to Josselin’s diary entries for the same days, where available.

The Earls Colne site also includes many church records — of baptisms, marriages, burials, etc — plus various documents from court proceedings. I’ve now added links from the relevant days to these sources.

Pepys didn’t have any direct connection to Earls Colne (a village forty miles north east of London) as far as I know, but I thought these contemporary documents would help provide some extra atmosphere and background reading. Here’s an example.

1 comment | Permalink | Thursday 7 August 2008 | New features

New maps of places in the diary

I’ve just added a new feature to the site: maps showing many places at once. They allow you to, for example, see all the churches in London Pepys has mentioned in one glance. Or London streets, or places outside Britain, and more.

Although we’ve had maps showing the locations of individual buildings, roads, etc for some time it seems more interesting and useful to be able to compare many on one map. It gives a better impression of the size of Pepys’ day-to-day world.

To help with these maps I’ve re-organised the categories of places in the Encyclopedia, particularly around what is defined as “within” and “outside” London. I’ve settled on defining London as being roughly what Pepys would have called London. Places beyond this, but still within what we think of as London today, are in London environs.

There are a lot of places listed in the Encyclopedia that don’t have location information and so aren’t shown on these maps at the moment. I hope to add more of them. If you come across a place in the Encyclopedia that doesn’t show a Google map when you view its own page, and you know where it is (or was) located, try using something like Get Lat Lon to find out the latitude and longitude and email them to me.

You should find links to these maps from appropriate places throughout the Encyclopedia. Thanks to those from the discussion group who suggested improvements on some early maps.

Unfortunately I haven’t been able to test these maps fully on Windows, so do let me know if you find anything that doesn’t work as expected. And any other suggestions for improvement (whether about the maps or not) are always appreciated.

10 comments | Permalink | Thursday 21 August 2008 | New features

Mark annotations for attention

Keeping the annotations tidy requires occasional tending. Despite all the spam filters a few spam annotations get through occasionally, and these only get deleted when someone notices them and emails me. And occasionally there are accidentally duplicated annotations which need tidying up. Also, an unfortunate number of annotations have been truncated during past database moves.

So, many thanks to those who have doing a fine job at calling my attention to such things, particularly Todd, Terry and Dirk.

I’ve now added a little thing to make it easier for people to mark annotations for attention and easier for me to deal with them. At the top of each annotation is a little “Flag this” link. Try clicking one (I’ve posted an example annotation below which you can try). You’ll see a screen that lets you flag an annotation with one of the following:

Spam

If it’s one of the many, and increasingly bizarre, spams.

Truncated

If the annotation disappears abruptly (usually at an apostrophe or similar punctuation mark). These are usually annotations from some time ago.

Duplicated

If there are two identical annotations, usually next to each other, you can flag one of them.

Off-topic

If an annotation is flagrantly off-topic and you’d like to draw it to my attention. It might not need deletion, more of a nudge from me to the author.

Edit required

If an annotation, probably one of your own, needs something corrected. Unfortunately there’s no other way to do this, so this is how.

Other

If there’s another reason, you’re just not sure which category this falls into, choose this.

You can optionally add an explanation, although it’s often not necessary (say, for obvious spam). And you can include your name and email address if you like, which may be useful if it’s something we might need to discuss.

If you change your mind, just hit the ‘Cancel’ button and you’ll be taken back to where you were, no harm done!

An annotation can only be flagged once so the “Flag this” link won’t disappear if someone’s got there ahead of you. You can assume I’ll deal with it soon.

This should all make it easier and quicker for anyone to bring this stuff to my attention, and easier and quicker for me to deal with it. Which should make the place more pleasant for everyone.

Do let me know if you find any problems or have any other comments. Thanks!

1 comment | Permalink | Wednesday 15 October 2008 | New features

Pepys family tree

I’ve put together a Pepys family tree as an alternative way of accessing Encyclopedia pages for all the Pepyses. It’s also hopefully useful as a way of getting an overview of how everyone’s related — it’s a big family!

The family tree is linked to from the Encyclopedia pages of all the people mentioned so it should be ready to hand whenever it’s useful. There’s also a printable PDF version, should you want to keep a paper version to hand.

I’ve tried to keep a balance between having the text big enough to read and enlarging it so much that one can’t view much of the tree at a time. If too many people find the text too tiny I can enlarge it. If you’re using Firefox 3 then you can zoom in using ‘Zoom’ under the ‘View’ menu and the image will be enlarged; I’m not sure if that will work in other browsers.

If you have any suggestions for additions or corrections do let me know.

7 comments | Permalink | Sunday 19 October 2008 | New features

Some new graphs

This weekend I’ve added two new types of graph to the site, to help visualise some information. One shows Pepys’ increasing wealth during the diary period and the other shows how often an Encyclopedia topic has been referenced in the diary.

Here’s the first one:

There’s more information about it on a new Encyclopedia page for Pepys’ wealth. The graph will update automatically when Pepys mentions his current financial status (although it may lag by an hour or so due to caching).

The second type of graph can be seen on the ‘References’ tab of every Encyclopedia topic, eg here or here. Here are those two examples, the first for Sir Edward Mountagu, the second for the Plague:

Of course, many topics will have very few bars showing on their charts but for some it’s quite a handy perspective on their waxing and waning importance in Pepys’ life. If a bar reaches the very top of the graph that shows the topic has been mentioned every single day that month.

Again, these graphs will update whenever the topic is mentioned, although I’ve been a bit cautious with the caching and these may be a few hours out of date.

Do let me know if you have any thoughts on improving these, or ideas for any other information you’d like to see in some kind of graph format.

5 comments | Permalink | Sunday 21 December 2008 | New features

Links to Evelyn/Pepys letters

Just a quick one… I recently added links next to diary entries when there was a letter written between John Evelyn and Pepys. The links take you to the text of the letter at this site. You can see examples on the entries for 9th or 13th December 1665.

(I realise Terry has been doing a fine job posting the letters in the relevant annotations, but we thought it would be good to have the links too, particularly as some forthcoming letters are rather long.)

1 comment | Permalink | Wednesday 31 December 2008 | New features

Pepys on Twitter

Ever one to keep up with the latest technologies, Samuel Pepys has now started twittering regularly. He’ll be updating around three times a day, so feel free to follow him if you want to keep up with what he’s doing before he gets round to writing his diary at night.

When thinking of putting Pepys on Twitter my first thought was simply to post a quote once a day, with a link to that day’s diary entry. But while compiling the quotes for upcoming days I realised that to be more in keeping with Twitter the account should update in real time.

So, technology willing, the samuelpepys account should update regularly with quotes from that day’s diary entry as if Sam’s sending them as the events happen. Of course, I’ve guessed at the time of day each event happens, but they should make sense.

The only oddity (well, aside from a 17th century Londoner using Twitter) is the days of the week not being in sync with our own — so while the time of day will be the same as ours (for those in the UK) Pepys will, for example, go to church on our Wednesdays.

I’m aware that posting the day’s events during the course of the day could seem like spoilers for that night’s diary. The simple answer is to not follow the Twitter feed; the events won’t appear on PepysDiary.com so there won’t be any spoilers on this site.

I hope the upside is that many people will now be able to keep up with Pepys’ life, even if in a minimal fashion, who wouldn’t usually read the diary at all.

Many thanks to Phil Gregory for donating the samuelpepys Twitter account for this purpose.

10 comments | Permalink | Sunday 10 May 2009 | New features

Portraits added to ‘pop ups’

I thought it would be useful if the little “pop up” pieces of text that appear when you hover over underlined words in the diary could also contain pictures. So I’ve been through all the people in the Encyclopedia who are also linked to Wikipedia pages, and copied any portraits found there.

246 people from the diary have portraits on their Wikipedia pages, and I’ve now added all these to the “pop up” texts. For example, on 4th August 1666, you can now easily see what Hinchingbroke, Penn and De Ruyter looked like.

I hope this makes it a little easier to picture the scenes Pepys described, and also to keep track of who’s who — I find this easier with pictures rather than names.

If you find any copyright free images of people (or other things!) that don’t currently have “pop up” pictures, do email me or post a comment below.

18 comments | Permalink | Saturday 8 August 2009 | New features

Diary and Encyclopedia data available

Those of you with a technological bent may be interested to know that I’ve packaged up a lot of the data behind this site into computer readable form that will make it easy for people to make new things.

There’s a lot more detail in the README file, which is also included in the 6MB zip archive of the data (no need to download that if you’re not a programmer-type person!).

All the files are in JSON format and include:

• The text of more than 3,000 diary entries, including footnotes and links to relevant Encyclopedia pages.

• A list of the categories used in the Encyclopedia, with their structure.

• All the data about the more than 4,000 topics in the Encyclopedia: names, descriptions, Wikipedia links, latitude/longitude, shapes, categories, etc.

• More than 300 thumbnail images of people included in the Encyclopedia.

That should be plenty of stuff for someone who likes exploring data to get their teeth into. We already have maps of places in the Encyclopedia and graphs of how often each Topic appears. But there must be a lot more interesting (and probably beautiful) things that could be done with all this. Pepys’ Shows, which I mentioned the other day used an early release of some of this data.

Do you have any ideas, even if you wouldn’t know how to make it yourself?

2 comments | Permalink | Saturday 22 January 2011 | New features

Daily London weather descriptions

I’ve just added another little piece of period data to the sidebar, which you’ll see on all diary entries from 11 November 1668 onwards: A brief description of the day’s weather, taken from John Gadbury’s London Weather Diary. That particular day, for example, was described as “Great winds and rain at night”.

These descriptions are taken from Keith J Tinkler’s formidable Daily Weather page which has lots more historical data on it.

Unfortunately Gadbury only began his diary a little while before Pepys finished his, but it should add some colour to the remaining months.

1 comment | Permalink | Saturday 12 November 2011 | New features

Letters between Pepys and Evelyn on the site

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