Apologies for the formatting problems on the site at the moment. I won’t be able to fix them for a few days. Thanks for your patience.
Update: I’ve managed to patch things up a bit so most of the broken pages should look OK. Many of the “tooltip” info boxes won’t appear over links, and other things might still be broken, but I’ll be able to fix those in a few days. (10.56pm, UK time)
Update 2: The site should be back to normal now. For some reason Movable Type (the software this site runs on) had truncated the template which is used to generate the start of each page. This meant that lots of the crucial code was missing from any newly-created or updated pages. (Monday 11th July)
Over the last few days there has been an increasing amount of spam annotations appearing. I’ve now added an extra question to the annotations form which will hopefully prevent automated spammers from successfully posting things. It’s a simple enough question that you shouldn’t have any problems with it!
I’ve given a talk about this website three times in recent months, and the most recent event, SkillSwap Seeking Stories, has put up an audio recording of my talk. I’ve also put up the slides I used that evening, so you can try recreating the talk in the comfort of your own chair…
The Telegraph has an article about the house in Brampton, Cambridgeshire, to which Sam hoped to retire, as it is up for sale. The article probably doesn’t contain much new to those of you who have been reading the diary, but it’s interesting to see a couple of pictures of the place.
You’ve no doubt noticed that many of the little pop-up descriptions of people, places, etc. in diary entries are lacking descriptive text. Which is a shame, especially for those who aren’t too familiar with the diary and Sam’s world. So I’ve put together a list of the most frequently-appearing topics that are currently lacking brief summaries.
Last weekend this site was mentioned briefly on the Click programme on the BBC News channel. It’s been repeated during the week and I recorded one of the broadcasts. Here’s the brief segment that tries its best to make a website full of text look as televisual as possible:
A week ago I put up a quick survey that asked three questions. I’ve since thought of more things I could have asked, but maybe we’ll do another sometime. Until then, here are the results based on the 400 people who completed the survey…
You may have seen this linked to from the front page already, so apologies for the duplication, but I’d appreciate it if you could answer this quick, anonymous, three question survey.
It’s rather hasty, and maybe I’ll do a more substantial one another time. Either way, I’ll share the results with you in a few days. Thanks!
The 20th January 2011 issue of the London Review of Books features two mentions of Samuel Pepys. Unfortunately, both are only available online to subscribers, but here are a couple of interesting quotes.
Those of you with a technological bent may be interested to know that I’ve packaged up a lot of the data behind this site into computer readable form that will make it easy for people to make new things.
Last weekend, at Culture Hack Day in London, Matthew Somerville and Clare Lovell made Pepys’ Shows. It’s a very simple fun thing: it shows a quote from Pepys’ diary about a random play, with a link to the relevant play at Matthew’s site Theatricalia. Click “freshen anew” to see another one of Sam’s mini reviews. Very nice.
I was on a TV programme on BBC One in the UK today, The One Show talking about Samuel Pepys and diaries. I was only on briefly, but here’s the video if you want to see (I start around 40 seconds in):
A year ago I mentioned in passing that there was an iPhone app in which you could read the first year of Samuel Pepys’ diary. Aimer Media have now updated the app, to include another year (1661 as well as 1660), plus a few new features. From the blurb:
On Friday 18th February 2011 I’m going to be talking about Samuel Pepys and this website at The Story, a one-day conference in London about stories and storytelling. I haven’t spoken much in public about the site, so I’m looking forward to it, despite being in awe of some of the other speakers.
I recently bought the 1668-9 volume of Sam’s diaries, in the usual HarperCollins / University of California Press edition of Latham & Matthews. Unfortunately, although it looks superficially identical, they recently seem to have changed the paper and printing and it looks much cheaper than all the previous volumes I’ve bought.