Daily entries from the 17th century London diary
News about this site and other Pepys-related events.
Wednesday 2nd June 2004
If you’ve been using the site over the past week you’re lucky if you’ve missed all the spam comments flooding the annotations. If the past four days are anything to go by we can expect around 500 of these to appear every night, even with the current safeguards in place. (For what it’s worth, I’m getting a similar number of spams appearing on my personal website.)
Wednesday 21st April 2004
There were a couple of problems on the site over the past few days: a few error messages appearing and 18th April 1661 failed to appear. Unfortunately web server upgrades coincided with me being on holiday, so I wasn’t aware there was a problem until now.
All is now well. The error messages were only appearing briefly and you can now read the missing 18th April 1661 diary entry.
Sunday 28th March 2004
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.
Thursday 11th March 2004
It’s been a while and we’re probably due for a reminder about the content of annotations. There is a set of guidelines which you should be aware of before posting annotations, although I hope no one finds them so daunting as to be off-putting!
Wednesday 4th February 2004
If you read Pepys’ Diary (or this recent news weblog) using an RSS reader, then you should note that the URLs of the feeds have changed. The new locations are all linked to from the other formats page. The old URLs should continue to work, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they break at some point over the next few years…
Wednesday 14th January 2004
Those of you who have explored the Background Info section will have found the lists of ‘TrackBack’ links for each item; kind of an index that lists when each item has been mentioned in the diary. (See also this for how the lists are generated, and this for an attempt at explaining TrackBack.)
Thursday 8th January 2004
Vincent Bell writes to point out a discussion on BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week that explores attitudes to sex and gender in a period close to Pepys’. Vincent says:
Wednesday 31st December 2003
Many people have had problems accessing the site over the Christmas period. The web server was moved to a new (and temporary) location just before Christmas but it appears that many ISPs were very slow to update their DNS records, which point www.pepysdiary.com to the computer serving its pages. Anyone using those ISPs were therefore unable to reach the site, because their computers couldn’t find the new server.
Wednesday 24th December 2003
A couple of people have pointed out this very nice review of the site in Christian Science Monitor. It seems more clueful than most reviews.
Thursday 18th December 2003
This site has been named as the best specialist weblog for 2003 in the Guardian’s second annual “British Blog Awards”. There’s also a full list of of winners and more about the awards.
Saturday 6th December 2003
Earlier in the year there was news of a dramatisation of Pepys starring Steve Coogan. It will be starting on BBC 2 on 16th December. There’s a BBC press release from September about it, but not much else that I can find on their site.
Wednesday 3rd December 2003
On Sunday there was a lovely article in the UK newspaper The Independent on Sunday that mentioned this site. It was in the ‘Talk of the Town’ magazine, which is only available in and around London but you can read qB’s original article here, or my scans of the story as it appeared: Page 1, Page 2. It’s one of those things that helps make this all worth while.
Sunday 16th November 2003
The server Pepys’ Diary is hosted on may be moved and/or otherwise reconfigured at some point in the next week or two. If so, the site won’t be available for a short time — possibly several hours, hopefully no longer. If there’s any further news while the site is down, I’ll post it to the discussion list, as that’s hosted at SmartGroups.
But with any luck, you’ll barely notice!
Monday 10th November 2003
A couple of people have pointed out that the (fictional) diary of Pepys’ wife, Elizabeth Pepys, is being serialised on BBC Radio 7. I’m not sure that you can listen to previous episodes, but if you check the schedule you can hopefully work out when others are broadcast. You can listen live on the site.
Sunday 26th October 2003
As an update to the previous item… I’ve made a change that will hopefully stop at least some of the “spam” appearing amongst annotations. For a while… Hopefully I haven’t broken anything else, but let me know if you notice anything has stopped working!
Thursday 23rd October 2003
I had a few emails recently about annotations posted where the users’ names linked to porn sites. These are “comment spam” and are an increasing problem on weblogs. I generally delete them when I check through all the annotations every few days, but this time they were apparently more noticeable!
Tuesday 30th September 2003
Roger Arbor writes: “Radio 4 is running this week excerpts from the life of Robert Hooke… later in the diary we will meet him, and Samuel writes of how impressed he was with him.”
Friday 29th August 2003
The Telegraph has an article about a million word journal kept by a puritan minister from 1677 to 1691. A relatively small part, 40,000 words, was, like Pepys’ diary, written in shorthand which has now been interpreted. It’s due to be published in 2005.
Monday 4th August 2003
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!
Sunday 27th July 2003
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.
