Interview on BBC Radio Scotland
23 March 2009
This afternoon I was on BBC Radio Scotland’s Book Café, talking about the Pepys’ Diary website. I doubt I said anything you don’t already know but I’ve made an MP3 of the segment you can listen to.
Site News
News about this site and other Pepys-related events.
Sunday Times article
9 March 2009
Yesterday there was an article in the Sunday Times about Pepys’ Diary, as well as the George Orwell Diaries and the posting of Pride and Prejudice to Facebook.
Links to Evelyn/Pepys letters
31 December 2008
Just a quick one… I recently added links next to diary entries when there was a letter written between John Evelyn and Pepys. The links take you to the text of the letter at this site. You can see examples on the entries for 9th or 13th December 1665.
Some new graphs
21 December 2008
This weekend I’ve added two new types of graph to the site, to help visualise some information. One shows Pepys’ increasing wealth during the diary period and the other shows how often an Encyclopedia topic has been referenced in the diary.
Annotation flagging change
19 October 2008
As I feared, spammers have found the form for flagging annotations and have begun submitting spam through it. These days spammers just send spam through any form they can find, whether it does them any good or not.
Pepys family tree
19 October 2008
I’ve put together a Pepys family tree as an alternative way of accessing Encyclopedia pages for all the Pepyses. It’s also hopefully useful as a way of getting an overview of how everyone’s related — it’s a big family!
Mark annotations for attention
15 October 2008
Keeping the annotations tidy requires occasional tending. Despite all the spam filters a few spam annotations get through occasionally, and these only get deleted when someone notices them and emails me. And occasionally there are accidentally duplicated annotations which need tidying up. Also, an unfortunate number of annotations have been truncated during past database moves.
New maps of places in the diary
21 August 2008
I’ve just added a new feature to the site: maps showing many places at once. They allow you to, for example, see all the churches in London Pepys has mentioned in one glance. Or London streets, or places outside Britain, and more.
More "On this day" information
7 August 2008
Some time ago I added the average monthly temperature and links to the House of Commons and House of Lords journals to the side of each diary entry. I’ve now added links to information at the Records of Earls Colne.
Site statistics
29 July 2008
A long time ago, possibly last year, I promised to round up some statistics about the site, such as the number of visitors. Sorry it’s taken so long, but here it finally is. As a point of comparison, here’s the first and possibly last time I wrote about this stuff.
Recent Activity and spam
24 June 2008
You’ll be pleased to read that the Recent Activity page is now back. Sorry it’s been away for so long, but my time is short at the moment.
An unfortunate side effect of the recent upgrade to Movable Type seems to be that suddenly more spam is getting through in annotations (and on the comments on my other sites). I’m not sure why this is at the moment, but I’ll keep my eye on it and delete them as soon as I can. The next (very imminent) update to the software promises a new method of stopping spam, and there are other things we could try, such as requiring people to log in before posting annotations.
If you see any spam that’s older than a day or two, please do let me know, otherwise assume that I’ll remove it when I’m next online. Thanks for your patience.
Recent Activity update
11 June 2008
I’m sorry for the continued lack of the lists of recent annotations on the Recent Activity page. The database queries that were generating these were taking a few seconds each to run and I’ve been trying to cut back on my sites’ use of the database. I’ve had a quick attempt at making these more efficient but haven’t had any joy yet.
Pepys music concerts in Massachusetts
22 May 2008
In June the Society of Historically Informed Performance are holding three concerts of music from Pepys’ time interspersed with readings from the diary. There’s more on their website and the dates and locations are are:
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Tuesday, 10 June 2008, 8:00pm: St. Peter’s Church, 320 Boston Post Rd, Weston MA
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Wednesday, 11 June 2008, 8:00pm: The Chapel At West Parish, 129 Reservation Rd, Andover MA
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Thursday, 12 June 2008, 8:00pm: Lindsey Chapel, Emmanuel Church, 15 Newbury St, Boston MA
Tickets can be bought here.
Server move complete
30 March 2008
The site is now living on a new webserver and everything should be back working again as normal.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there are a few little problems lurking somewhere that I haven’t fixed yet, so email me or post a comment below if you find something not working as it should. Thanks.
New contextual pop-up help
27 March 2008
I’m not really sure what to call this. Tool-tips? Hover help? Anyway, you should now notice something new if you hover your mouse cursor over any of the linked words in Diary entries. Here’s an example:
Server move on Saturday
26 March 2008
This weekend, probably Saturday afternoon or evening, UK time, I’ll be moving Pepys’ Diary to a new webserver. My hosting provider is gradually moving all websites to new machines and our time has come. The benefit will be that if the server crashes in future it should be back in action very quickly — it can currently take over an hour for the sites to reappear.
In order to avoid losing any annotations during this process I will, as usual, be removing all the annotation forms on the site before I make the move. Sorry for the slight inconvenience. I’ll post another message when everything is moved over.
Recent Press
20 February 2008
The site has been mentioned favourably a few times in the press recently, mainly due to its inclusion in Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks from the Wild Web by Sarah Boxer (Amazon US, UK). Here’s a quick summary for those who are interested.
Talks at St Olave's Church
14 February 2008
Glyn Thomas has discovered a series of monthly talks about Pepys, given at St Olave, Hart St, London. Here’s a PDF flyer with the full information and here are the dates and topics for the rest of the year:
Hundreds of Wikipedia pages now included
30 December 2007
As I mentioned a couple of months ago I’ve been adding Wikipedia content into the Encyclopedia pages. I’ve now looked through the 2,797 Encyclopedia pages and 535 now feature Wikipedia content.
Awards and an interview
10 November 2007
First of all a big “thank you” to those of you who voted for Pepys’ Diary in the 2007 Weblog Awards for Best Literature Blog. It was a close-run thing toward the end. The day before voting closed we were 3-400 votes behind Neil Gaiman’s Journal but on the final day we’d caught up and got nearly 100 votes ahead. So thanks to all of you who made the effort, and particularly those of you who emailed many more people asking for their support (and thanks to all the friends and colleagues of mine who voted and encouraged others to take part too).