A couple of months back I said that the references in the Encyclopedia — which link back to the diary entries on which a person, place, etc was mentioned — were no longer updating. I’ve just finished some work that means these should now be complete and up to date at last! It’ll be a couple more days before I get round to making this happen automatically for new diary entries, but by next week everything should up to date on a daily basis. As ever, let me know if you spot anything that’s broken.
If it’s not one thing it’s another… All the Encyclopedia pages have a section at the bottom that shows when that person, building, or whatever is mentioned in the diary. These links are generated automatically by Movable Type’s TrackBack facility. It’s been a bit flaky at times but has mostly worked.
Thanks for being patient over the last few days of nastily unreadable annotations. I’ve finally found the problem and everything should be working fine (well, as fine as it was last week, anyway). I’d changed a setting in Movable Type without realising what other effects it might have. If you want to know more about the cause read on here.
You’ve probably noticed that annotations are looking rather odd at the moment — the text is too large and there are no paragraph breaks. I’m not sure what’s up — Movable Type isn’t formatting them correctly all of a sudden — and for the moment I’m stumped.
If you post annotations on the site you may well have found you get error messages when trying to do so. It’s happened to me a few times and I don’t post nearly as much as many of you, so I can only apologise for your frustrations!
You may have noticed that some punctuation characters in annotations are appearing strangely on the site recently. This happened since I upgraded Movable Type, the software used to run most of the site.
I think most people are aware of the discussion group over at SmartGroups, where people talk about Pepys-related topics that don’t directly fit in to the daily annotations or any of the other sections of the site. I’ve now decided to start a new social group where anything goes.
After another batch of spam hit the annotations last night I’ve installed the new SpamLookup filter which, along with the existing MT-Blacklist will hopefully reduce the floods of spam about cruises and more dubious products to a few drops.
Well it looks like most things are settling down at the new server. There have been a few little glitches, but I’m hoping this is due to the changes taking a few days to propagate around the internet.