Daily entries from the 17th century London diary
In case you like to keep an updated version of the Pepys Family Tree to hand, I’ve just made a couple of small updates to it. I’ve added Babs and Betty, daughters of Roger Pepys, and his new wife, Esther (all over on the far right). I’ve also added Elizabeth Pickering’s 1668 marriage to John Creed, which had gone unrecorded.
I had a brainwave about how the Recent Activity page is generated and it seems to work. The page is now re-created every five minutes and seems to do so without keeping the database occupied for ages like it used to. Fingers crossed it’ll keep working like this from now on.
I’m afraid I’ve had to stop the Recent Activity page from updating again. The database queries that make these listings are very slow and they’re holding up other features of the site, such as posting annotations.
You may have noticed that the Recent Activity page has been problematic this past week, with the lists of recently-commented-on pages disappearing. It’s all back now, and working OK, but it won’t be updating as frequently as it used to.
I keep getting asked what will happen to the website when the diary ends in 2012 (or 1669). And so that I have one place to point people for the answer, here’s the current plan, such as it is.
If anyone likes to keep the latest version of the extended Pepys family tree to hand, you should note that I’ve just updated it. The only addition is some of the Pickerings, distant relatives of Samuel by marriage through the Montagus. Let me know if you ever think of more people who can be added to this ever-growing chart!
Apologies for the formatting problems on the site at the moment. I won’t be able to fix them for a few days. Thanks for your patience.
Update: I’ve managed to patch things up a bit so most of the broken pages should look OK. Many of the “tooltip” info boxes won’t appear over links, and other things might still be broken, but I’ll be able to fix those in a few days. (10.56pm, UK time)
Update 2: The site should be back to normal now. For some reason Movable Type (the software this site runs on) had truncated the template which is used to generate the start of each page. This meant that lots of the crucial code was missing from any newly-created or updated pages. (Monday 11th July)
Over the last few days there has been an increasing amount of spam annotations appearing. I’ve now added an extra question to the annotations form which will hopefully prevent automated spammers from successfully posting things. It’s a simple enough question that you shouldn’t have any problems with it!
You’ve no doubt noticed that many of the little pop-up descriptions of people, places, etc. in diary entries are lacking descriptive text. Which is a shame, especially for those who aren’t too familiar with the diary and Sam’s world. So I’ve put together a list of the most frequently-appearing topics that are currently lacking brief summaries.
The survey is now closed.
You may have seen this linked to from the front page already, so apologies for the duplication, but I’d appreciate it if you could answer this quick, anonymous, three question survey.
It’s rather hasty, and maybe I’ll do a more substantial one another time. Either way, I’ll share the results with you in a few days. Thanks!