29 May 2012

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:

Added overlays to maps

In any of the maps on the site (like this one) there is now ‘Pepys overlays…’ button at the top-right. Clicking this lets you switch on three overlays to give a better idea of aspects of Pepys’ London: the route of the City wall; the area that was damaged by the Great Fire; and the area that London’s buildings covered. I’ve tried to be accurate but it’s not like accurate historical research! The extent of buildings is particularly rough, but hopefully gives an idea of scale.

Added Annotations to the exported data

When I originally created a computer-readable export of lots of the data behind the site, some people hoped I would add annotations, because they’re such an important part of the whole experience. I’ve now included these (increasing the size of the zip file from 8MB to 20MB!).

Improvents to first three months of the Diary

When this site started I wasn’t as rigorous as I am today about adding links from Diary entries to Encyclopedia topics. But I’ve now been through the first three months’ worth of entries and brought them up to the standard of recent entries.

Fixed the pop-up tips on iPad etc

The little panels that appear in Diary entries when you move your cursor over a link have always been a problem on devices like iPads — they would never disappear. They should now work better: Touch a link to make the panel appear, then touch elsewhere for it to disappear. Or touch the link again to go to that page.

Added references to letters

Although Encyclopedia topics show when that topic was referenced in Diary entries, there was never a similar feature for when a topic was referenced in Pepys’ letters. Now there is, for example on the page for Erith in Kent, which was mentioned in three of the letters from John Evelyn we have on the site.

Added diary references to Pepys’ wealth

While we’ve had a page that graphs Pepys’ wealth over time, it didn’t have references to specific Diary entries. Now it does.

Added a Whitehall Palace map

I’ve added a category to the large maps that groups all the individual places Pepys has mentioned in Whitehall Palace.

Tidied up the list of London taverns

The Encyclopedia page that lists taverns in London had got rather confused, with many taverns from elsewhere in the country. Now it only includes London locations, with the others now on the Rest of Britain page (which could probably do with some reorganisation itself).

And that’s all! I wish I’d done some of these a lot sooner, but you can’t do everything at once. Hopefully they’ll be a benefit in the future.