Site News

More Pepys talks at St Olave’s

Samuel Pepys’ local church near the Tower of London, St Olave’s, has been hosting talks about their famous former parishioner for some time and are about to launch a new series to commemorate the 350th anniversary of the start of the diary.

Each talk will look at a month’s worth of the diary from 1660. You can download a flyer from this page, but here’s the basic information:

• Monday 18 January: The Diary Begins
• Monday 1 February: Pepys and January 1660
• Monday 1 March: Pepys and February 1660
• Monday 12 April: Pepys and March 1660
• Monday 10 May: Pepys and April 1660
• Monday 7 June: Pepys and May 1660
• Monday 5 July: Pepys and June/July 1660
• Monday 29 November: Pepys and the Royal Society

Food is served from 6.15pm and the events start at 6.45pm. £15 on the door or contact Phil Manning (admin.stolave [at] me [dot] com, or 020 7488 4318). The address is St Olave Church, Hart Street, London EC3R 7NB.

2 comments | Permalink | Friday 15 January 2010 | Events

Pepys on TV and the iPhone

Two items from the Pepys’ Diary email list:

First, for those in the UK, BBC FOUR has a programme called Mr Pepys’s Diary on Monday 18th January at 10pm:

Clarissa Dickson Wright, Tony Benn and Sir Richard Eyre join Claire Tomalin and other Pepys devotees to bring you the sensuous and extraordinary world of his diaries. Gourmet tastes mingle with adulterous liaisons, naval bureaucracy and the Great Fire, as Pepys records his detailed observations of London society. The documentary explores how this first great English diary continues to chime with modern readers’ lives.

I assume it will be on iPlayer after the event, but again for UK residents only.

Second, a company called Aimer Media has just released a 59p/$0.99 app for the iPhone and iPod Touch based on the diary (iTunes link). It currently only includes the text for 1660 but they’re looking for ideas on how to make it more interesting.

1 comment | Permalink | Friday 15 January 2010 | Pepys in the media

Business Standard article and a Pepys walk

The second half of this article about Pepys on the Indian website Business Standard discusses this site:

In 2003, a quirky and enterprising young web designer named Phil Gyford realised that Pepys’s diary was tailor-made for the Internet age. So he started putting it online: as a blog. Every day Gyford uploads a new entry to PepysDiary.com, exactly as Pepys wrote it, and on the same calendar day. Thus, on his website, now seven years into the diary, it is January 9 of both 1667 and 2010.

In the way these things work, Pepys has now collected his own 21st-century community — a cohort of dedicated Pepys followers who await their daily dose of the 1660s. Because much about 17th-century London is opaque or mysterious to the modern reader, Gyford designed the blog so that knowledgeable readers could annotate each entry on their own. Every Pepys entry draws a train of comments, and out of this small space a community has grown.

I find this fascinating. It well reflects modern patterns of Internet-based fannish sociability — many strangers communing over an abstraction. Yet it also reflects Pepys’s own times, because the readers become amateur scholars and conversants. This reverses decades of academic specialisation; yet it highlights the academicisation of so much of our public discourse. Most of all, however, it’s amusing to note that we citizen Netizens can be so harmoniously collegial only about something in the distant past.

Also, there’s an article in the Times today which features a walk of Pepys’ London by historian and TV presenter Dan Cruickshank.

Be the first to comment | Permalink | Saturday 9 January 2010 | Press for this site

Site statistics 2009

It’s been nearly a year and a half since I last shared some statistics about the site and the start of a new year seems a good time to look back, so here are the latest stats…

Diary, Encyclopedia and annotations

The Diary section of the site currently has 2,557 entries (not all of them published yet) and 49,008 annotations (this figure doesn’t include spam annotations), so that’s an average of about 19 annotations per diary entry (it was 20 last time). The main software used to catch spam annotations has caught 50,125 of them since it was first used around 18 months ago.

Here’s a graph from Movable Type showing the number of annotations posted each day on Diary entries over the past four months:

The Encyclopedia section features 3,589 topics (again, not all published), 2,037 of them people, and 711 of them featuring information from Wikipedia. A total of 7,351 annotations have been posted in the Encyclopedia, and here’s the graph of activity over the past four months:

The In-Depth Articles and the Site News sections of the site have received 212 and 1021 comments respectively making for a grand total of 57,592 across the whole site (8236 more than last time).

Every link from a Diary entry to an Encyclopedia topic creates a reference back to the Diary entry and there have been 39,174 of these to date.

Visitors, page views, etc.

According to Google Analytics, over the past month (4th December to 3rd January) the site has had 33,823 Absolute Unique Visitors (ie, different people) visiting a total of 63,963 times for a total of 151,565 Pageviews. Those figures are up on the same period a year ago: 7.31% for Unique Visitors, 7.30% for Visits and 11.25% for Pageviews.

Here are some graphs of daily statistics from 16th November 2005, the earliest I have Google Analytics data for (click to see larger versions).

Visits:

Pageviews:

I think the dip to zero is due to me making a temporary mistake with installing the Google Analytics script.

And here’s a map indicating where Visits came from during 2009 (813,143 visits from 209 countries/territories):

And data for the top 25 countries (according to number of Visits), also for 2009:

UPDATE: I’ve added the table below, from Google Analytics, which represents “Visitor Loyalty” for 7 Dec 2009 to 6 Jan 2010. While a large number of people have only visited once or twice, it’s interesting to see that around a third of Visitors visited an average of at least once a day or more.

For those of a technical bent, here’s a breakdown of which web browsers and operating systems are most popular here:

And this is an indication of where traffic comes from:

(“Direct Traffic” is people who have bookmarked the site or type the URL in; “Search engines” is visits that came from someone searching on Google etc; and “Referring Sites” is visits that occurred by someone following a link from any other site to get here.)

Here are the top 25 things people searched for on search engines to get here (numbers in brackets are the number of visits for that search term during 2009):

1. samuel pepys (23,386)
2. pepys diary (18,404)
3. samuel pepys diary (12,808)
4. pepys (11,276)
5. diary (2,811)
6. the diary of samuel pepys (1,886)
7. diary of samuel pepys (1,701)
8. diary entries (1,582)
9. pepysdiary (1,242)
10. pepys diary online (1,142)
11. noise of fiddlers (1,109)
12. pepysdiary.com (1,072)
13. peeps diary (1,044)
14. www.pepysdiary.com (928)
15. whitehall palace (898)
16. seething lane (866)
17. diary entry (858)
18. elizabeth pepys (769)
19. creechurch lane, synagogue (731)
20. diaries (715)
21. lady castlemaine (710)
22. pepys blog (707)
23. diary samuel pepys (639)
24. shipbuilder anthony deane (566)
25. samuel peeps (550)

RSS feeds and email

Next, a summary of how many people read the site via RSS or email (possibly in addition to on the web). The main Diary feed has 3,199 subscribers, the Story So Far feed has 123 subscribers, the Encyclopedia 56 subscribers, Site News 232 and In-Depth Articles 52.

Here’s a graph showing the number of subscribers to the Diary feed since I started using FeedBurner to host the feeds in October 2007:

And here are the most popular ways to read the RSS feeds over the past month:

1. Google Reader / iGoogle (1018)
2. LiveJournal (855)
3. Bloglines (393)
4. NewsGator Online (108)
5. FriendFeed (90)

Twitter

Since the last statistics post, Samuel has been posting snippets from the diary on Twitter. He’s posted 906 times, currently has 2510 followers, and is featured in 173 lists.

Time

Occasionally people ask how much time it takes to run this website, so in 2009 I kept track of the time I spent on it. It was a relatively quiet year as I didn’t add many new features or re-design anything major.

Here’s the breakdown of the total number of hours spent on various tasks over 2009:

Task	Hours
Preparing diary entries (including Twitter posts)	117.0
Adding pictures to hover “tool tip” links	12.0
Dealing with flagged annotations	5.0
Fixing truncated comments	4.5
Writing a script to automate posting to Twitter	3.5
General fixing of broken things	3.0
Publishing Story So Far summaries	1.5
Writing Site News	1.0
Publishing In-Depth Articles	0.5
Miscellaneous other tasks	2.5
Total	150.5

There were probably lots of little bits here and there I forgot to time but that’s about it for a quiet twelve months: 150.5 hours, or nearly four working weeks per year.

Thanks

Finally, as this is sort of a wrap-up of the past year I’d like to thank everyone for reading the site and to everyone who’s posted an annotation.

I’d also like to offer special thanks to three people:

• Terry Foreman, who has offered many corrections and suggestions to make the Encyclopedia and linking to it better.
• Jeannine Kerwin, who has continued to write the monthly Story So Far summaries.
• Max Wainer, who has been diligently alerting me to hundreds of annotations which were truncated by an old database move, only a fraction of which I’ve had time to fix so far.

Thanks again to everyone, and I hope 2010 (and 1667) is a good year for you all!

10 comments | Permalink | Monday 4 January 2010 | Statistics