Daily entries from the 17th century London diary
It only took seven hours after opening up registrations for our first spammer to sign up. I suppose one must admire their speed. So far that account is the only of several spammers that has posted an annotation (since deleted). I’ve disabled those accounts but that doesn’t stop more spammers registering.
It’s taken longer than I hoped, but it’s now possible to post annotations/comments again.
It’s been a little while since my previous post about the new site, so here’s an update.
I’m experimenting with a few things on the site, with the aim of starting it running again in the New Year. To make this easier for me — and because very few annotations have been posted recently — I’ve turned off the ability to post annotations for a while.
Usually diary entries appear at 11pm UK time, sort of simulating the idea that Pepys wrote it at the end of his day. I’m loath to break with this near decade-long tradition, but Thursday’s entry will appear two hours early, at 9pm UK time. This is so that readers in the UK are more likely to be able to read it “live”, should they wish to do so. I hope this doesn’t spoil the routine of anyone too much!
As we approach the end of the diary it would be great to read what your favourite moments from the diary are. Any particular phrases or events that have stuck in your head? Any especially memorable descriptions? If it’s a brief snippet, post it in a comment below, with a link to the diary entry. If you have an entire entry that you want to share, just post a link to it and tell us why you love it.
Some time ago Laura K suggested we have a roll call for readers of the diary to say hello. This seems like a good time.
As we approach the end of the diary there’s a chance this site will attract some publicity. I’m not going out of my way to get lots of coverage, but then I didn’t when the site started and there was quite a bit! I mention this because if there is publicity then we will have many more visitors to our friendly part of the web.
In case you like to keep an updated version of the Pepys Family Tree to hand, I’ve just made a couple of small updates to it. I’ve added Babs and Betty, daughters of Roger Pepys, and his new wife, Esther (all over on the far right). I’ve also added Elizabeth Pickering’s 1668 marriage to John Creed, which had gone unrecorded.
I had a brainwave about how the Recent Activity page is generated and it seems to work. The page is now re-created every five minutes and seems to do so without keeping the database occupied for ages like it used to. Fingers crossed it’ll keep working like this from now on.