Daily entries from the 17th century London diary
News about this site and other Pepys-related events.
I’m sorry for the continued lack of the lists of recent annotations on the Recent Activity page. The database queries that were generating these were taking a few seconds each to run and I’ve been trying to cut back on my sites’ use of the database. I’ve had a quick attempt at making these more efficient but haven’t had any joy yet.
In June the Society of Historically Informed Performance are holding three concerts of music from Pepys’ time interspersed with readings from the diary. There’s more on their website and the dates and locations are are:
Tuesday, 10 June 2008, 8:00pm: St. Peter’s Church, 320 Boston Post Rd, Weston MA
Wednesday, 11 June 2008, 8:00pm: The Chapel At West Parish, 129 Reservation Rd, Andover MA
Thursday, 12 June 2008, 8:00pm: Lindsey Chapel, Emmanuel Church, 15 Newbury St, Boston MA
Tickets can be bought here.
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.
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:
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.
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.
Glyn Thomas has discovered a series of monthly talks about Pepys, given at St Olave, Hart St, London. Here’s a PDF flyer with the full information and here are the dates and topics for the rest of the year:
As I mentioned a couple of months ago I’ve been adding Wikipedia content into the Encyclopedia pages. I’ve now looked through the 2,797 Encyclopedia pages and 535 now feature Wikipedia content.
First of all a big “thank you” to those of you who voted for Pepys’ Diary in the 2007 Weblog Awards for Best Literature Blog. It was a close-run thing toward the end. The day before voting closed we were 3-400 votes behind Neil Gaiman’s Journal but on the final day we’d caught up and got nearly 100 votes ahead. So thanks to all of you who made the effort, and particularly those of you who emailed many more people asking for their support (and thanks to all the friends and colleagues of mine who voted and encouraged others to take part too).
I’ve now added the ability for some pages in the Encyclopedia to automatically pull in relevant content from Wikipedia.