Daily entries from the 17th century London diary
When I rebuilt this site at the beginning of 2013, ready for the second cycle of the diary, I didn’t have time to finish the design of the pages. While all the behind-the-scenes code had been built from scratch, the visible parts didn’t get much attention. The monochrome look was functional but didn’t give the impression a website about a 17th century character should.
For those of you who like to have the latest version to hand, I’ve updated the family tree.
Welcome to the new website, just in time for 1st January. The diary entries will be appearing each day on the front page from 11pm (London time) on 1st January 2013, starting with 1st January 1660. The RSS feed and daily emails should also start working again.
I’ve give the the family tree a probably final update. I’d been planning to give it a tweak — filling in some of the post-diary dates, and adding a couple of people who appeared late in the diary — but I’ve also now added a lot more Montagus. There’s now a new chunk featuring the eminent family, Pepys’s distant relations, on the right-hand end. It’s quite a confusing family — there are several Edward Montagus for example — so having them displayed like this helps make things clearer!
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been going through my neglected list of things on the site I’ve been meaning to fix or add. Better (very) late than never! Here’s what I’ve been doing:
I’ve just added a new section to the site, for letters to and from Samuel Pepys. It currently lists a selection of letters between Pepys and the era’s other major diarist, John Evelyn.
I’ve just added another little piece of period data to the sidebar, which you’ll see on all diary entries from 11 November 1668 onwards: A brief description of the day’s weather, taken from John Gadbury’s London Weather Diary. That particular day, for example, was described as “Great winds and rain at night”.
Those of you with a technological bent may be interested to know that I’ve packaged up a lot of the data behind this site into computer readable form that will make it easy for people to make new things.
I thought it would be useful if the little “pop up” pieces of text that appear when you hover over underlined words in the diary could also contain pictures. So I’ve been through all the people in the Encyclopedia who are also linked to Wikipedia pages, and copied any portraits found there.
Ever one to keep up with the latest technologies, Samuel Pepys has now started twittering regularly. He’ll be updating around three times a day, so feel free to follow him if you want to keep up with what he’s doing before he gets round to writing his diary at night.