Imminent disruption to the site
This site will shortly be moving to a new server — although there haven’t been many problems due to the current server, there will hopefully be even fewer at the new one!
Site News
News about this site and other Pepys-related events.
Apologies for spoilers
Last night a whole week of the diary appeared on the site… Apoologies if this has spoiled your enjoyment in any way. I updated Movable Type (the software used to run this site) but forgot to re-implement the customisation that copes with the automated posting of 343 year old diary entries. So it posted everything! I’ll try and remember this moment next time I upgrade…
Pepys topic map
Kal Ahmed has been busy creating topic map of events in Pepys’ Diary. What is it? Kal takes the events of each day and transforms them into XML, a format that can be easily interpreted by computer programs. From this he’s generated web pages that, for example, show you when Sam sent and received letters, what plays have been mentioned, or what happened when he journeyed from Brampton to Hatfield.
Pepys walks in London
Glyn Thomas, one of our annotators, has been very busy putting together a walk through the City of London around places familiar to Pepys and readers of his diary. I know some of you have obtained copies direct from Glyn, but we thought it would make sense to put it on the site for anyone else. The 22 page document describes the route and plenty of background. You can download it as a 432K PDF. Many thanks to Glyn for his hard work on this - do let him know what you think! (glyn_thomas1234 [at] yahoo.co.uk)
The story so far is now up to date
The Story So Far section of the site is now up to date, providing a monthly summary of events in the diary. Hopefully this should help people who haven’t been with us since the start, who have to take a break from the diary, or those of us who simply need reminding of past events occasionally.
Site traffic statistics
It’s been well over a year since I last looked at the traffic statistics for this site - to be honest I’m not overly concerned with getting huge numbers of visitors. Things seem to be going smoothly, with plenty of interesting annotations, and that’s what matters most.
No imminent site upgrades
I mentioned that I would be upgrading this site’s software so that a simple log-in would be required before posting annotations. This would hopefully help cut down on the large amount of spam appearing in annotations. Unfortunately, the software I was upgrading (Movable Type 3) seems to need a bit more work… rather than try and work round a few problems I’m going to hold off and wait for official fixes. I’ll post another message here whenever I next plan to do this. (If you’re really interested in the problems, there’s more here.)
Possible site problems on Monday
On Monday I will be upgrading the software used to run the site, which will hopefully make it possible to stop the spam links to porn sites appearing in annotations (another few hundred appeared last night). Hopefully all will go smoothly, but this is an advanced warning that if you notice something broken on Monday, I’m probably already trying to fix it!
Spam and site problems
If you’ve been using the site over the past week you’re lucky if you’ve missed all the spam comments flooding the annotations. If the past four days are anything to go by we can expect around 500 of these to appear every night, even with the current safeguards in place. (For what it’s worth, I’m getting a similar number of spams appearing on my personal website.)
Apologies for recent problems
There were a couple of problems on the site over the past few days: a few error messages appearing and 18th April 1661 failed to appear. Unfortunately web server upgrades coincided with me being on holiday, so I wasn’t aware there was a problem until now.
All is now well. The error messages were only appearing briefly and you can now read the missing 18th April 1661 diary entry.