Daily entries from the 17th century London diary
News about this site and other Pepys-related events.
Sometime this Sunday (21st) I’m going to be doing some major work on the site. I’ll be switching off the ability to add annotations while doing this. The site may well look broken for a little while too. I’ll post a message when everything’s up and running again. I thought it was time for a new lick of paint around here…
Some time ago I raised the possibility of readers of the diary adopting pages in the Encyclopedia and becoming editors of them. I made a few changes to the site that made this possible, and a couple of press-ganged “volunteers”, Jeannine and Todd, have so far given this a try.
I’ve now finished updating the code that runs the encyclopedia section of the site. There are a few differences to the layout of pages, but the biggest reorganistion is invisible. It will now, at last, be easier for volunteer editors to manage individual encyclopedia pages. Stay tuned…!
Today I’m making a lot of structural changes to the encyclopedia section of the site, in preparation for allowing people to volunteer as editors for specific entries. So expect things to look broken from time to time until I post a message to say it should all be working again…
Apologies for the lack of new diary entries — I haven’t been any busier than usual, but what with one thing and another I completely forgot to enter another week’s worth of entries this week and the supply has run dry! I’ll catch up later today or tomorrow.
Since the site started, most of the places listed in the Encyclopedia have had links to their location on Streetmap. I’ve now replaced these with a map from Google Maps which shows the location in the page, which is more convenient.
I’m switching the ability to annotate off temporarily while I try and fix the bug that’s causing comments to be truncated…
If you can read this, you’re seeing the site on the new server, and annotations should be working again. I expect something will break somewhere along the line, but hopefully things are OK…
In a moment I’ll be switching off the ability to post annotations. I’m about to move this (and my other sites) to a new server and I need to switch off annotations to make sure nothing’s lost in the process. When everything is working on the new server I’ll post a message there. Because it can take a while for the news of a site moving to work its way around the internet, it could be hours or days until you can see the new server. Hopefully it won’t be too long!
You’ll be pleased to know that the Recent Annotations page is back. It used to be re-built every time an annotation was posted, which might have been one of several factors contributing to the Internal Server Errors. The page is now built whenever the page is viewed which will take some load off Movable Type’s comment-handling script (actually, the page is never built more than once every two minutes, so it may occasionally lag a minute or two behind).
I think it’s working correctly, but let me know if you notice anything particularly odd. Also, if there’s anything about the page that could be improved, so it’s a better quick overview of all that’s happening on the site, do post below or to the new discussion group.