Site News
News about updates or problems with the site, and other Pepys-related news.
Daily entries from the 17th century London diary
Server move complete
The site is now living on a new webserver and everything should be back working again as normal.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there are a few little problems lurking somewhere that I haven’t fixed yet, so email me or post a comment below if you find something not working as it should. Thanks.
2 comments | Permalink | Sunday 30 March 2008
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
Server move on Saturday
This weekend, probably Saturday afternoon or evening, UK time, I’ll be moving Pepys’ Diary to a new webserver. My hosting provider is gradually moving all websites to new machines and our time has come. The benefit will be that if the server crashes in future it should be back in action very quickly — it can currently take over an hour for the sites to reappear.
In order to avoid losing any annotations during this process I will, as usual, be removing all the annotation forms on the site before I make the move. Sorry for the slight inconvenience. I’ll post another message when everything is moved over.
Recent Press
The site has been mentioned favourably a few times in the press recently, mainly due to its inclusion in Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks from the Wild Web by Sarah Boxer (Amazon US, UK). Here’s a quick summary for those who are interested.
5 comments | Permalink | Wednesday 20 February 2008