Daily entries from the 17th century London diary
Ever one to keep up with the latest technologies, Samuel Pepys has now started twittering regularly. He’ll be updating around three times a day, so feel free to follow him if you want to keep up with what he’s doing before he gets round to writing his diary at night.
Just a quick one… I recently added links next to diary entries when there was a letter written between John Evelyn and Pepys. The links take you to the text of the letter at this site. You can see examples on the entries for 9th or 13th December 1665.
This weekend I’ve added two new types of graph to the site, to help visualise some information. One shows Pepys’ increasing wealth during the diary period and the other shows how often an Encyclopedia topic has been referenced in the diary.
I’ve put together a Pepys family tree as an alternative way of accessing Encyclopedia pages for all the Pepyses. It’s also hopefully useful as a way of getting an overview of how everyone’s related — it’s a big family!
Keeping the annotations tidy requires occasional tending. Despite all the spam filters a few spam annotations get through occasionally, and these only get deleted when someone notices them and emails me. And occasionally there are accidentally duplicated annotations which need tidying up. Also, an unfortunate number of annotations have been truncated during past database moves.
I’ve just added a new feature to the site: maps showing many places at once. They allow you to, for example, see all the churches in London Pepys has mentioned in one glance. Or London streets, or places outside Britain, and more.
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.
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:
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.
I’ve now added the ability for some pages in the Encyclopedia to automatically pull in relevant content from Wikipedia.