I have added a bit of extra contextual information in the sidebar next to every diary entry. You can now see:
The average temperature for that month (daily data isn’t available until 1772) as recorded by Gordon Manley of the Royal Meteorological Society. You can view the full dataset on the Met Office’s website.
Links to the relevant daily Journals for the House of Commons and House of Lords from British History Online. These will hopefully give some context to Pepys’ more political activities.
My thanks to Terry Foreman for finding both these sources of information that help bring Pepys’ world alive. If anyone can suggest anything else, do let me know.
I updated the Movable Type software this afternoon, which meant shutting off annotations for a short while. Everything should all be back to normal now. If you see notice anything not working quite right, do email me or post a message below. Thanks for your patience!
At some point this weekend, probably on Saturday afternoon, UK time, I’ll be upgrading the software that powers this (and other) sites. This will mean that first I’ll hide all the forms for posting annotations (so nothing is lost or broken in the switch-over) and then things might look a bit odd if I break something. Hopefully it won’t take too long and I’ll post here again when it’s all up and running.
The most requested feature for the site has been to receive daily diary entries by email. It may have taken me nearly five years for me to manage this but, finally, it’s now possible.
Just a reminder of two meet-ups happening this coming Saturday 15th September, in London and Boston, coincidentally marking our half-way point through the diary. First, the London gathering, suggested by Glyn Thomas:
I’ve been very bad at organising another get-together for anyone who can make it. But Glyn Thomas has gently badgered me enough and has a good suggestion:
Thanks for all your comments on the new design. I’ve made a few changes based on what you said, as described below. If things look a little odd you may need to visit this file and click the Reload button in your browser.
As you can tell, the site’s had a lick of paint! Everything should be working OK now, so if you come across anything that looks broken, or that doesn’t work as you expect, do let me know (and tell me which web browser and operating system you’re using).
All being well I’ll be making some changes to the site sometime this afternoon/evening (Friday, UK time). I’ll be temporarily switching off the ability to post annotations while I do this, and the site may look broken during this whole process. I’ll post another note when everything’s finished.
Although I hoped to make a lot of changes to the site today, I haven’t quite got everything ready. Rather than start now and stay up into the night I’m going to postpone the changes for the time being. Sorry for the false alarm! I’ll try and give some warning when I next have a chance to get this done, sometime in the next week or two.