Daily entries from the 17th century London diary
News about this site and other Pepys-related events.
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.)
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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!
