Daily entries from the 17th century London diary
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.
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!
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!
I had a few emails recently about annotations posted where the users’ names linked to porn sites. These are “comment spam” and are an increasing problem on weblogs. I generally delete them when I check through all the annotations every few days, but this time they were apparently more noticeable!
I’ve noticed recently that annotations seem to be drifting “off-topic” quite frequently. This can be interesting and enlightening but please do be aware that annotations should enhance the particular diary entry, not just now but also in many years time. The annotations about pasties and MAs have tended to stray rather off the beaten track, as have some of the parallels between diary events and today’s politics.
One of the first links on the front page of this site is to the Story so far page. This is intended to be a brief introduction to Pepys and his world, for anyone who’s just joining us as we progress through the diary. The lower third of the page is supposed to be a summary of what’s happened since the diary began but, as you can tell, it’s rather out of date.
Half a year in… it seems like the diary’s been going a long time, but we’ve only just begun! Thanks to everyone who’s contributed annotations to the site — I’m sure I speak for many people when I say the diary has come alive thanks to the information and discussion posted over the past few months. Here are some statistics for you about the diary so far…
I’m sorry the 16 June 1660 entry was late in appearing… my computer developed problems just as I was about to enter another batch of diary entries. All OK now though.
Yesterday I altered the way the fonts on the site are defined, and wondered if anyone would notice. Todd did, so I thought I’d mention it here in case anyone else wonders why something’s different. Most people shouldn’t notice much difference, a few should notice some improvement, especially on small text and with browsers set to display text smaller than usual. I’ve tested it on most browsers on Windows and Mac OS X, but let me know if you have any problems.
A while back Languagehat sent me a link to a site about handwriting in the 16th and 17th centuries. I set up a Background Info page for handwriting, but thought the site was interesting enough to point out here too.