Daily entries from the 17th century London diary
News about this site and other Pepys-related events.
Monday 5th December 2005
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.
Wednesday 30th November 2005
The Original London Walks website is advertising a special Pepys-inspired walk on the morning of Christmas Day. Clicking a link in the right-hand column of their home page pops up this page:
Monday 24th October 2005
You may have noticed that some punctuation characters in annotations are appearing strangely on the site recently. This happened since I upgraded Movable Type, the software used to run most of the site.
Monday 3rd October 2005
I think most people are aware of the discussion group over at SmartGroups, where people talk about Pepys-related topics that don’t directly fit in to the daily annotations or any of the other sections of the site. I’ve now decided to start a new social group where anything goes.
Thursday 29th September 2005
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.
Thursday 15th September 2005
Next Tuesday, 20th September 2005, there’s a solo play in Greenwich, in which actress Siobhan Nicholas plays the part of Elizabeth Pepys. From the blurb:
Sunday 24th July 2005
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…
Wednesday 13th April 2005
After another batch of spam hit the annotations last night I’ve installed the new SpamLookup filter which, along with the existing MT-Blacklist will hopefully reduce the floods of spam about cruises and more dubious products to a few drops.
Saturday 5th March 2005
Last year I posted a link to a document describing a walk around the City of London, compiled by regular annotator Glyn Thomas. He’s been busy, because he’s now prepared a sequel, a very detailed walk around Westminster.
Sunday 27th February 2005
Well it looks like most things are settling down at the new server. There have been a few little glitches, but I’m hoping this is due to the changes taking a few days to propagate around the internet.
Thursday 24th February 2005
If you can read this, then it means you’re viewing the site on the new server. Phew!
Thursday 24th February 2005
As promised, the server is moving, and I am about to switch off the ability to post annotations (it may have happened by the time you read this). This makes it easier for me to transfer the database without losing anyone’s contributions. The site should be back to normal in a matter of hours, although it’s possible these things can take a day or two. Thanks for your patience!
Monday 21st February 2005
This site will shortly be moving to a new server — although there haven’t been many problems due to the current server, there will hopefully be even fewer at the new one!
Tuesday 2nd November 2004
Last night a whole week of the diary appeared on the site… Apoologies if this has spoiled your enjoyment in any way. I updated Movable Type (the software used to run this site) but forgot to re-implement the customisation that copes with the automated posting of 343 year old diary entries. So it posted everything! I’ll try and remember this moment next time I upgrade…
Friday 24th September 2004
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.
Thursday 12th August 2004
Glyn Thomas, one of our annotators, has been very busy putting together a walk through the City of London around places familiar to Pepys and readers of his diary. I know some of you have obtained copies direct from Glyn, but we thought it would make sense to put it on the site for anyone else. The 22 page document describes the route and plenty of background. You can download it as a 432K PDF. Many thanks to Glyn for his hard work on this - do let him know what you think! (glyn_thomas1234 [at] yahoo.co.uk)
Thursday 22nd July 2004
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.
Thursday 24th June 2004
It’s been well over a year since I last looked at the traffic statistics for this site - to be honest I’m not overly concerned with getting huge numbers of visitors. Things seem to be going smoothly, with plenty of interesting annotations, and that’s what matters most.
Monday 7th June 2004
I mentioned that I would be upgrading this site’s software so that a simple log-in would be required before posting annotations. This would hopefully help cut down on the large amount of spam appearing in annotations. Unfortunately, the software I was upgrading (Movable Type 3) seems to need a bit more work… rather than try and work round a few problems I’m going to hold off and wait for official fixes. I’ll post another message here whenever I next plan to do this. (If you’re really interested in the problems, there’s more here.)
Saturday 5th June 2004
On Monday I will be upgrading the software used to run the site, which will hopefully make it possible to stop the spam links to porn sites appearing in annotations (another few hundred appeared last night). Hopefully all will go smoothly, but this is an advanced warning that if you notice something broken on Monday, I’m probably already trying to fix it!