Hundreds of Wikipedia pages now included
As I mentioned a couple of months ago I’ve been adding Wikipedia content into the Encyclopedia pages. I’ve now looked through the 2,797 Encyclopedia pages and 535 now feature Wikipedia content.
Site News
News about this site and other Pepys-related events.
Awards and an interview
First of all a big “thank you” to those of you who voted for Pepys’ Diary in the 2007 Weblog Awards for Best Literature Blog. It was a close-run thing toward the end. The day before voting closed we were 3-400 votes behind Neil Gaiman’s Journal but on the final day we’d caught up and got nearly 100 votes ahead. So thanks to all of you who made the effort, and particularly those of you who emailed many more people asking for their support (and thanks to all the friends and colleagues of mine who voted and encouraged others to take part too).
Encyclopedia now including Wikipedia content
I’ve now added the ability for some pages in the Encyclopedia to automatically pull in relevant content from Wikipedia.
Temperature and politics
I have added a bit of extra contextual information in the sidebar next to every diary entry. You can now see:
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The average temperature for that month (daily data isn’t available until 1772) as recorded by Gordon Manley of the Royal Meteorological Society. You can view the full dataset on the Met Office’s website.
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Links to the relevant daily Journals for the House of Commons and House of Lords from British History Online. These will hopefully give some context to Pepys’ more political activities.
My thanks to Terry Foreman for finding both these sources of information that help bring Pepys’ world alive. If anyone can suggest anything else, do let me know.
Disruption over
I updated the Movable Type software this afternoon, which meant shutting off annotations for a short while. Everything should all be back to normal now. If you see notice anything not working quite right, do email me or post a message below. Thanks for your patience!
Site disruption at the weekend
At some point this weekend, probably on Saturday afternoon, UK time, I’ll be upgrading the software that powers this (and other) sites. This will mean that first I’ll hide all the forms for posting annotations (so nothing is lost or broken in the switch-over) and then things might look a bit odd if I break something. Hopefully it won’t take too long and I’ll post here again when it’s all up and running.
Get Pepys' Diary by email
The most requested feature for the site has been to receive daily diary entries by email. It may have taken me nearly five years for me to manage this but, finally, it’s now possible.
Reminder: Pepys meet-up (London and Boston), September 15th
Just a reminder of two meet-ups happening this coming Saturday 15th September, in London and Boston, coincidentally marking our half-way point through the diary. First, the London gathering, suggested by Glyn Thomas:
Pepys meet-up, September 15th
I’ve been very bad at organising another get-together for anyone who can make it. But Glyn Thomas has gently badgered me enough and has a good suggestion:
Site design updates
Thanks for all your comments on the new design. I’ve made a few changes based on what you said, as described below. If things look a little odd you may need to visit this file and click the Reload button in your browser.