Sunday Times article
Yesterday there was an article in the Sunday Times about Pepys’ Diary, as well as the George Orwell Diaries and the posting of Pride and Prejudice to Facebook.
Site News
News about this site and other Pepys-related events.
Links to Evelyn/Pepys letters
Just a quick one… I recently added links next to diary entries when there was a letter written between John Evelyn and Pepys. The links take you to the text of the letter at this site. You can see examples on the entries for 9th or 13th December 1665.
Some new graphs
This weekend I’ve added two new types of graph to the site, to help visualise some information. One shows Pepys’ increasing wealth during the diary period and the other shows how often an Encyclopedia topic has been referenced in the diary.
Annotation flagging change
As I feared, spammers have found the form for flagging annotations and have begun submitting spam through it. These days spammers just send spam through any form they can find, whether it does them any good or not.
Pepys family tree
I’ve put together a Pepys family tree as an alternative way of accessing Encyclopedia pages for all the Pepyses. It’s also hopefully useful as a way of getting an overview of how everyone’s related — it’s a big family!
Mark annotations for attention
Keeping the annotations tidy requires occasional tending. Despite all the spam filters a few spam annotations get through occasionally, and these only get deleted when someone notices them and emails me. And occasionally there are accidentally duplicated annotations which need tidying up. Also, an unfortunate number of annotations have been truncated during past database moves.
New maps of places in the diary
I’ve just added a new feature to the site: maps showing many places at once. They allow you to, for example, see all the churches in London Pepys has mentioned in one glance. Or London streets, or places outside Britain, and more.
More "On this day" information
Some time ago I added the average monthly temperature and links to the House of Commons and House of Lords journals to the side of each diary entry. I’ve now added links to information at the Records of Earls Colne.
Site statistics
A long time ago, possibly last year, I promised to round up some statistics about the site, such as the number of visitors. Sorry it’s taken so long, but here it finally is. As a point of comparison, here’s the first and possibly last time I wrote about this stuff.
Recent Activity and spam
You’ll be pleased to read that the Recent Activity page is now back. Sorry it’s been away for so long, but my time is short at the moment.
An unfortunate side effect of the recent upgrade to Movable Type seems to be that suddenly more spam is getting through in annotations (and on the comments on my other sites). I’m not sure why this is at the moment, but I’ll keep my eye on it and delete them as soon as I can. The next (very imminent) update to the software promises a new method of stopping spam, and there are other things we could try, such as requiring people to log in before posting annotations.
If you see any spam that’s older than a day or two, please do let me know, otherwise assume that I’ll remove it when I’m next online. Thanks for your patience.