Daily entries from the 17th century London diary
News about this site and other Pepys-related events.
Friday 3rd February 2012
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.
Thursday 2nd February 2012
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.
Tuesday 31st January 2012
For those unable to make it to the end-of-Diary gathering in London, but might be closer to Massachusetts, here’s something for you!
Saturday 21st January 2012
You may have noticed that the Recent Activity page has been problematic this past week, with the lists of recently-commented-on pages disappearing. It’s all back now, and working OK, but it won’t be updating as frequently as it used to.
Tuesday 3rd January 2012
I keep getting asked what will happen to the website when the diary ends in 2012 (or 1669). And so that I have one place to point people for the answer, here’s the current plan, such as it is.
Tuesday 13th December 2011
A few weeks ago I met Regan Hutchins near Seething Lane and he recorded us chatting about Pepys for Culture File on the Irish radio station RTE Lyric FM.
The interview was broadcast on 2nd December and you can listen to it as an MP3 here.
Sunday 27th November 2011
As most of you are probably aware, the diary ends next year. (Apologies if this is a spoiler for you, but I fear this particular surprise is unavoidable.) It would be great to see Sam off with a gathering in London for anyone who’s able to make it.
Saturday 12th November 2011
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”.
Friday 14th October 2011
If anyone likes to keep the latest version of the extended Pepys family tree to hand, you should note that I’ve just updated it. The only addition is some of the Pickerings, distant relatives of Samuel by marriage through the Montagus. Let me know if you ever think of more people who can be added to this ever-growing chart!
Thursday 4th August 2011
The BBC Radio 4 show, Woman’s Hour is soon going to be featuring a drama based on Samuel Pepys’ diary. There will be five 15 minute episodes, broadcast at 10.45am (UK time) from Monday 15th to Friday 19th August. Here’s the press release from this page:
Thursday 7th July 2011
Apologies for the formatting problems on the site at the moment. I won’t be able to fix them for a few days. Thanks for your patience.
Update: I’ve managed to patch things up a bit so most of the broken pages should look OK. Many of the “tooltip” info boxes won’t appear over links, and other things might still be broken, but I’ll be able to fix those in a few days. (10.56pm, UK time)
Update 2: The site should be back to normal now. For some reason Movable Type (the software this site runs on) had truncated the template which is used to generate the start of each page. This meant that lots of the crucial code was missing from any newly-created or updated pages. (Monday 11th July)
Sunday 26th June 2011
Over the last few days there has been an increasing amount of spam annotations appearing. I’ve now added an extra question to the annotations form which will hopefully prevent automated spammers from successfully posting things. It’s a simple enough question that you shouldn’t have any problems with it!
Saturday 21st May 2011
Anyone in London next month might be interested in this “dramatic reading” about Samuel Pepys and the theatre. Here’s the full blurb:
Wednesday 13th April 2011
I’ve given a talk about this website three times in recent months, and the most recent event, SkillSwap Seeking Stories, has put up an audio recording of my talk. I’ve also put up the slides I used that evening, so you can try recreating the talk in the comfort of your own chair…
Wednesday 13th April 2011
A brief amusement for you… On Twitter, @lili_bird asked @wesingyourtweet to sing one of @samuelpepys’ tweets. Apparently they sing tweets on request. And here’s the video of their brief sung version of one of Sam’s more uneventful tweets. Thanks all!
Tuesday 29th March 2011
The Telegraph has an article about the house in Brampton, Cambridgeshire, to which Sam hoped to retire, as it is up for sale. The article probably doesn’t contain much new to those of you who have been reading the diary, but it’s interesting to see a couple of pictures of the place.
Tuesday 29th March 2011
You’ve no doubt noticed that many of the little pop-up descriptions of people, places, etc. in diary entries are lacking descriptive text. Which is a shame, especially for those who aren’t too familiar with the diary and Sam’s world. So I’ve put together a list of the most frequently-appearing topics that are currently lacking brief summaries.
Saturday 5th March 2011
Last weekend this site was mentioned briefly on the Click programme on the BBC News channel. It’s been repeated during the week and I recorded one of the broadcasts. Here’s the brief segment that tries its best to make a website full of text look as televisual as possible:
Friday 25th February 2011
A week ago I put up a quick survey that asked three questions. I’ve since thought of more things I could have asked, but maybe we’ll do another sometime. Until then, here are the results based on the 400 people who completed the survey…
Wednesday 16th February 2011
The survey is now closed.
You may have seen this linked to from the front page already, so apologies for the duplication, but I’d appreciate it if you could answer this quick, anonymous, three question survey.
It’s rather hasty, and maybe I’ll do a more substantial one another time. Either way, I’ll share the results with you in a few days. Thanks!