Daily entries from the 17th century London diary
As promised, the server is moving, and I am about to switch off the ability to post annotations (it may have happened by the time you read this). This makes it easier for me to transfer the database without losing anyone’s contributions. The site should be back to normal in a matter of hours, although it’s possible these things can take a day or two. Thanks for your patience!
This site will shortly be moving to a new server — although there haven’t been many problems due to the current server, there will hopefully be even fewer at the new one!
Last night a whole week of the diary appeared on the site… Apoologies if this has spoiled your enjoyment in any way. I updated Movable Type (the software used to run this site) but forgot to re-implement the customisation that copes with the automated posting of 343 year old diary entries. So it posted everything! I’ll try and remember this moment next time I upgrade…
I mentioned that I would be upgrading this site’s software so that a simple log-in would be required before posting annotations. This would hopefully help cut down on the large amount of spam appearing in annotations. Unfortunately, the software I was upgrading (Movable Type 3) seems to need a bit more work… rather than try and work round a few problems I’m going to hold off and wait for official fixes. I’ll post another message here whenever I next plan to do this. (If you’re really interested in the problems, there’s more here.)
On Monday I will be upgrading the software used to run the site, which will hopefully make it possible to stop the spam links to porn sites appearing in annotations (another few hundred appeared last night). Hopefully all will go smoothly, but this is an advanced warning that if you notice something broken on Monday, I’m probably already trying to fix it!
If you’ve been using the site over the past week you’re lucky if you’ve missed all the spam comments flooding the annotations. If the past four days are anything to go by we can expect around 500 of these to appear every night, even with the current safeguards in place. (For what it’s worth, I’m getting a similar number of spams appearing on my personal website.)
There were a couple of problems on the site over the past few days: a few error messages appearing and 18th April 1661 failed to appear. Unfortunately web server upgrades coincided with me being on holiday, so I wasn’t aware there was a problem until now.
All is now well. The error messages were only appearing briefly and you can now read the missing 18th April 1661 diary entry.
It’s been a while and we’re probably due for a reminder about the content of annotations. There is a set of guidelines which you should be aware of before posting annotations, although I hope no one finds them so daunting as to be off-putting!
If you read Pepys’ Diary (or this recent news weblog) using an RSS reader, then you should note that the URLs of the feeds have changed. The new locations are all linked to from the other formats page. The old URLs should continue to work, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they break at some point over the next few years…
Those of you who have explored the Background Info section will have found the lists of ‘TrackBack’ links for each item; kind of an index that lists when each item has been mentioned in the diary. (See also this for how the lists are generated, and this for an attempt at explaining TrackBack.)