The end of the second cycle
Thank you all so much for taking part over the past 9 years and 5 months – or however long you’ve been here for!
Site News: Housekeeping
In-depth Articles tweaks
I’ve made a few tweaks to the In-depth Articles section the first of which is to re-name it simply “Articles”.
A Samuel Pepys Diary API
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!
Daily diary emails update
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.
Diary entries by email service changing
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.
Maps are working again
The maps in the Encyclopedia should be working again, after a few days of being blank.
Maps aren't working
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!
Podcast episode about the site's technical aspects
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.
Email discussion group has moved
It’s possible that many regular readers of this site aren’t aware that there’s a related email discussion group. It’s been running for some years on Yahoo Groups but isn’t very prominently advertised here, which I’ll try to fix. However, because Yahoo is deleting all its groups’ archives the Pepys’ Diary group has now moved over to Groups.io.
The website has been moved
Update: If you can read this the site has been successfully moved and everything should be working again.