Articles

Phil Gyford has written four articles:


Annotations and comments

Phil Gyford has posted 773 annotations/comments since 27 December 2002.

Comments

First Reading

About Wednesday 5 August 1668

Phil Gyford  •  Link

Laura, a good idea to have some kind of "roll call". I'll make a note to post something like this as we get nearer the inevitable end. If anyone else has other ideas for things they'd like to see not the site before or after the diary finishes, feel free to email me!

About Thursday 9 March 1664/65

Phil Gyford  •  Link

I have belatedly (only more than three years late!) corrected the link to "Lilly" as per Paul Chapin's earlier annotation. It now refers to the long-dead grammarian, rather than the 17th century astrologer.

About Saturday 20 June 1668

Phil Gyford  •  Link

Not sure how that happened djc and Peter! I don't have time to investigate it properly right now, so I've removed the day of the week from the next/previous links for the time being, seeing as the rest of it is correct. (The site is slowly rebuilding as I type; should be finished soon.)

About Survey results

Phil Gyford  •  Link

The site is very much geared to reading the "current" day/year, so it's not that surprising that not many people start with 1660 each January. It would be possible to change the site so there's an easier way for new people to start the diary from the beginning each year, but (selfishly) I prefer this to be a one-off project that will come to an end, rather than on ongoing, rolling, never-ending thing.

About Survey results

Phil Gyford  •  Link

Good idea James. The most popular countries from Google Analytics:

38.4% United States
35.2% United Kingdom
6.7% Canada
3.4% Australia
2.8% Germany
1.3% Netherlands
1.1% New Zealand

So, similar, but some differences, mainly that US and UK are closer in the Analytics stats.

About Quick survey

Phil Gyford  •  Link

Derek, it would probably be best to ask in the annotations of a diary entry when he makes such a journey. I'm not sure of the answer off the top of my head.

About Wednesday 29 January 1667/68

Phil Gyford  •  Link

Paul - thanks for the "eeriest"/"veriest" correction. A shame: I imagine some people could accurately be described as "eery"! I've corrected it (as I usually do with the occasional obvious typo in the Project Gutenberg text, which L&M have differently). I'll also go back and fix the previous occurrences, for future readers.

About Diary and Encyclopedia data available

Phil Gyford  •  Link

Paul, thanks for the kind words.

I would like to add the comments to these files but this was kind of a first draft, which I was trying to get ready for History Hackday http://historyhackday.org/ in case anyone there would find it useful.

The best way of preserving stuff online seems to be to make many copies of it. So distributing everything like this should hopefully ensure that if this site disappears (eg, after I die!) then the data, including everyone's contributions in the form of annotations over the years, will still exist.

And thanks for the New Palace Yard correction -- that's purely my typo in the file, rather than a data problem. I've fixed it now.