Phil Gyford

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 New maps of places in the diary

Phil Gyford  •  Link

Good question Glyn. I wouldn't say it's going to hugely change the say we think about Pepys, but I think it's a modest change. One thing is that it makes me realise quite how small Pepys' London is compared to even what we think of as "Central London" today.

Also it's perhaps just the first step in different ways to look at all the data we're building up about Pepys on the site, and hopefully there'll be more interesting and useful ones over the next few years.

About Sunday 1 October 1665

Phil Gyford  •  Link

Re Bergie's comment above about the inaccurate 'tool tip' text for the word "cards": Sorry about that -- it's fixed now.

About Sunday 10 September 1665

Phil Gyford  •  Link

Another nudge Carl -- please keep annotations on diary entries on-topic and use the discussion group for discussion of meet ups. Diary entry annotations are not the right forum for this. Thanks.

About Saturday 9 September 1665

Phil Gyford  •  Link

Carl, just a nudge... I like to keep the annotations on diary entries relevant to the diary entry. If you'd like me to post something in the Site News section about meet ups I'm more than happy to. There is also the discussion group. Thanks.

About Site statistics

Phil Gyford  •  Link

John: Actually there's a gradual dip around Christmas, which is understandable as people go away. Then a big peak on January 6th - maybe the site had some press then, or it was when people came back from holiday and wanted to catch up.

Paul: My mistake, the Number 17 "samuel pepys" should have been "samuel pypes", which I've now corrected.

About Recent Activity and spam

Phil Gyford  •  Link

Jens, yes I was using Akismet before but when I upgraded Movable Type I accidentally forgot to copy across one of its files and so it very quietly stopped working. I've now replaced it with TypePad AntiSpam which some say works even better than Akismet.

About Recent Activity update

Phil Gyford  •  Link

Apologies for the continued absence. It's a busy time for me at the moment -- I'm in the final few weeks of a two year course -- and have hit a little problem with upgrading Movable Type. I hope to have it resolved this week, with a following wind...

About Server move complete

Phil Gyford  •  Link

Sorry about that -- I'd put a bunch of diary entries into the system with 2008 dates rather than 1665, which rather confused the system!

About New contextual pop-up help

Phil Gyford  •  Link

Incidentally, in case you're wondering why there's that 'p' in the middle of the current URLs... it's because when the site began I only envisaged linking to a handful of "people" and "places" mentioned, so "p" seemed the logical directory name. It was only when the site became more popular, and there was obviously a need for more background information, that the Encyclopedia expanded to cover all topics.

About New contextual pop-up help

Phil Gyford  •  Link

It is possible but is unlikely to happen I'm afraid, for several reasons. First, because it would mean having to redirect all requests for the old numeric URLs to the new ones; not impossible, but with 2,875 of them, it's a lot.

Second, because it's much easier for me to put the links into the Diary entries using the numbers rather than another scheme. Because this is my main maintenance task I don't want to make it any harder!

Third, because the titles of some pages change over time. This isn't the end of the world, as the URLs could remain the same regardless, but it would create inconsistencies.

Having said all that, you're right, it would be more friendly, and were I starting the site now I'd do as you suggest because it's regarded better practice. But when the site began at the end of 2002 I don't think it was particularly simple to do with Movable Type, the software I'm using.

About Encyclopedia now including Wikipedia content

Phil Gyford  •  Link

I've now finished going through all 2,797 Encyclopedia entries to find corresponding Wikipedia pages. So, at time of writing, we now have 535 entries including Wikipedia text.

Because the text is pulled in from a third party (Wikipedia) where it can be edited and changed, things might break on some PepysDiary.com pages occasionally -- as ever, let me know if you see something that looks obviously broken!

About Saturday 12 November 1664

Phil Gyford  •  Link

If you have problems with something technical on the site it's best to email me directly, or the Yahoo discussion group, as I don't always have time to read the annotations (and it stops the annotations getting filled with things not relevant to the diary itself).

Let me know what browser and version you're using, and whether it's Windows or Mac, at phil@gyford.com. Thanks.

About Temperature and politics

Phil Gyford  •  Link

I'd prefer to keep annotations and non-annotations quite separate to be honest, with the latter having more constraints in terms of accuracy (whereas annotations can have more opinion) and legality (must be free of copyright).

If there was a site that had Evelyn's diary on it with a separate entry for each page, that would be ideal to link to (or even grab the text from and include that).