More "On this day" information
Some time ago I added the average monthly temperature and links to the House of Commons and House of Lords journals to the side of each diary entry. I’ve now added links to information at the Records of Earls Colne.
Site News
News about this site and other Pepys-related events.
Site statistics
A long time ago, possibly last year, I promised to round up some statistics about the site, such as the number of visitors. Sorry it’s taken so long, but here it finally is. As a point of comparison, here’s the first and possibly last time I wrote about this stuff.
Recent Activity and spam
You’ll be pleased to read that the Recent Activity page is now back. Sorry it’s been away for so long, but my time is short at the moment.
An unfortunate side effect of the recent upgrade to Movable Type seems to be that suddenly more spam is getting through in annotations (and on the comments on my other sites). I’m not sure why this is at the moment, but I’ll keep my eye on it and delete them as soon as I can. The next (very imminent) update to the software promises a new method of stopping spam, and there are other things we could try, such as requiring people to log in before posting annotations.
If you see any spam that’s older than a day or two, please do let me know, otherwise assume that I’ll remove it when I’m next online. Thanks for your patience.
Recent Activity update
I’m sorry for the continued lack of the lists of recent annotations on the Recent Activity page. The database queries that were generating these were taking a few seconds each to run and I’ve been trying to cut back on my sites’ use of the database. I’ve had a quick attempt at making these more efficient but haven’t had any joy yet.
Pepys music concerts in Massachusetts
In June the Society of Historically Informed Performance are holding three concerts of music from Pepys’ time interspersed with readings from the diary. There’s more on their website and the dates and locations are are:
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Tuesday, 10 June 2008, 8:00pm: St. Peter’s Church, 320 Boston Post Rd, Weston MA
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Wednesday, 11 June 2008, 8:00pm: The Chapel At West Parish, 129 Reservation Rd, Andover MA
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Thursday, 12 June 2008, 8:00pm: Lindsey Chapel, Emmanuel Church, 15 Newbury St, Boston MA
Tickets can be bought here.
Server move complete
The site is now living on a new webserver and everything should be back working again as normal.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there are a few little problems lurking somewhere that I haven’t fixed yet, so email me or post a comment below if you find something not working as it should. Thanks.
New contextual pop-up help
I’m not really sure what to call this. Tool-tips? Hover help? Anyway, you should now notice something new if you hover your mouse cursor over any of the linked words in Diary entries. Here’s an example:
Server move on Saturday
This weekend, probably Saturday afternoon or evening, UK time, I’ll be moving Pepys’ Diary to a new webserver. My hosting provider is gradually moving all websites to new machines and our time has come. The benefit will be that if the server crashes in future it should be back in action very quickly — it can currently take over an hour for the sites to reappear.
In order to avoid losing any annotations during this process I will, as usual, be removing all the annotation forms on the site before I make the move. Sorry for the slight inconvenience. I’ll post another message when everything is moved over.
Recent Press
The site has been mentioned favourably a few times in the press recently, mainly due to its inclusion in Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks from the Wild Web by Sarah Boxer (Amazon US, UK). Here’s a quick summary for those who are interested.
Talks at St Olave's Church
Glyn Thomas has discovered a series of monthly talks about Pepys, given at St Olave, Hart St, London. Here’s a PDF flyer with the full information and here are the dates and topics for the rest of the year: