Daily entries from the 17th century London diary
News about this site and other Pepys-related events.
I’ve just opened up an API for accessing data from the site, something that might be useful to other developers. If you don’t know what an API (application programming interface) is, no need to worry, and you can safely ignore it!
NOTE: The Groups.io list described here was closed at the end of 2022 and replaced by one at Buttondown. See this Site News post for more info.
As mentioned in the previous post, I’ve changed the service used to send each day’s diary entry out by email, which means people need to subscribe to the new service (instructions here). The old service has now been switched off.
For years it’s been possible to receive “today’s” diary entry by email through the Feedburner service. That service is ending the email feature and so I’m changing how the emails work.
If you wish to continue receiving diary entries by email you must subscribe to the new group by the end of April 2021. After this emails will not be sent by the existing Feedburner-powered service.
There’s a new book about to come out by Jacky Colliss Harvey, called Walking Pepys’s London. The publisher has offered readers of this site 20% off plus free UK delivery if you order it from their website using the coupon code PEPYSDIARY. Here’s the blurb:
The History of Parliament blog has a new post today about how Christmas was celebrated, or not, in the mid-17th century, which users Pepys’ diary’s one of its examples:
David James Harries recently got in touch to mention a paper he wrote for The Journal of Dry Eye and Ocular Surface Disease, entitled ‘Pepys’s Eyes: A Modern Answer to an Old Conundrum?’. Here’s the abstract:
The maps in the Encyclopedia should be working again, after a few days of being blank.
The maps in the Encyclopedia aren’t working at the moment – none of the graphical “tiles” that make up the maps are loading. I can’t tell exactly why and don’t have much time right now to look into it. Hopefully Mapbox (who provide the free tiles) will get back to me, or else I’ll find the time to rewrite the map-generating code. I’m not sure how long this will take, sorry!
Readers of this site may be interested in a new book, The Closet: The Eighteenth-Century Architecture of Intimacy by Danielle Bobker, which looks at this room as it was written about by various authors, including Samuel Pepys. Given how interested Pepys was in improving and enjoying his closet, it sounds interesting.
If you’re at all interested about the technical aspects behind this site then here’s just the thing for you… I was interviewed for an episode of the Running in Production podcast. I talk about the code that runs the site and how it’s served.