Daily entries from the 17th century London diary
BBC News Online asked me to write an article about this site.
Be the first to comment | Permalink | Thursday 2 January 2003 | Press for this site
I did an interview for NPR’s All Things Considered programme which you can now hear online.
Be the first to comment | Permalink | Saturday 4 January 2003 | Press for this site
More press coverage for the site in the last few days: USA Today, Washington Post (bottom of the page) and The Guardian, twice, in ‘Web Watch’ (which overstates the longevity of Haddock.org by three years) and as a Books ‘Site of the Week.’ The site is also mentioned at Die Zeit although they don’t appear to have permalinks.
1 comment | Permalink | Thursday 9 January 2003 | Press for this site
There are a few paragraphs about the site in today’s ‘Circuits’ section of The New York Times (half way down the page). And ABC 702 Sydney radio in Australia broadcast a recorded interview with me about Pepys’ Diary a week or so ago, although there are no online archives. Maybe that’s a good thing.
Be the first to comment | Permalink | Thursday 16 January 2003 | Press for this site
Among many weblog entries about this site over the past few weeks, this one by Greg Elin is perhaps the most enthusiastic. Pointing this out might seem like I’m blowing my own trumpet, but that’s not my intention… the feature Elin raves most about is the annotations which, with a handful of exceptions, are not my work. The point is it’s the willingness of you to research and post useful information and links that makes this site, and the rest of the internet, quite so interesting. I was able to take some free text (from Project Gutenberg), publish it using free technology (such as PHP and Movable Type) and enable people to share knowledge. This is what it’s all about.
Be the first to comment | Permalink | Monday 20 January 2003 | Press for this site
On Tuesday 21st January at around 1.40pm GMT I’ll be interviewed live on BBC Radio London’s Robert Elms show about this site. It should be fun and you can listen live online. I don’t think it’s archived unfortunately.
3 comments | Permalink | Monday 20 January 2003 | Press for this site
The local newspaper from where I grew up has published a short piece about the site. The Witham and Braintree Times isn’t online in any useful form so here’s the article for your entertainment and my embarrassment:
Witham Viewpoint with Eve Sweeting
He may not have enjoyed history lessons at school but Phil Gyford, 31-year-old son of Witham historian Janet Gyford and her husband John, is now showing distinct signs of following in his mother’s footsteps.
Phil, a former pupil at Witham’s Chipping Hill, Templars and Rickstones Schools has devised an interactive website — The Diary of Samuel Pepys — which is proving a big hit.
Those logging on can enjoy a day by day entry from the diaries of Samuel Pepys, the famous 17th century diarist who lived in London and, besides recording more dramatic times such as the Great Fire of London, also noted how much turkey his family ate at Christmas and the fall-outs with his wife.
The site is proving as popular as the soaps. “Better than Emmerdale,” is one comment from a reader.”
Phil, a web designer, actually went to America to study the future, in which he took a masters degree.
Such is the interest, however, in his current look back to the past that he has been interviewed on both American and Australian radio and featured in the Washington Post as well as BBC News Online.
Phil welcomes questions and comments on each day’s entry.
Phil says: “I am attempting to keep the diary content as close to the original as the web format and the translations through Victorian editors and Project Gutenberg’s process allow.”
So far the Pepys Diaries are a mix of domestic and wider news.
It seems an entertaining and agreeable way of digesting the famous diaries in bite-sized chunks — and from what I’ve read so far I can quite see the site becoming as compulsive as Coronation Street.
If you want to long on it is: www.pepysdiary.com
4 comments | Permalink | Saturday 25 January 2003 | Press for this site
The New York Times has an article which is mostly about Pepys, this site and comparing weblogs in general to Pepys’ style. Be a bit careful though; some huge interactive GE advert on the page locked my browser up for several minutes until I could get Back off the page (using Mozilla on Mac OS X); I resorted to Lynx. (Thanks Gerry.)
3 comments | Permalink | Saturday 1 February 2003 | Press for this site
There was a bit about the site in the issue of Web User that just left the UK newsstands; I didn’t read it, so I’m not sure what it said. I’ll also be interviewed by Valerie Richardson on WPKN in Bridgeport, Connecticut at around 10.30am local time today.
4 comments | Permalink | Friday 7 February 2003 | Press for this site
On Sunday there was a lovely article in the UK newspaper The Independent on Sunday that mentioned this site. It was in the ‘Talk of the Town’ magazine, which is only available in and around London but you can read qB’s original article here, or my scans of the story as it appeared: Page 1, Page 2. It’s one of those things that helps make this all worth while.
1 comment | Permalink | Wednesday 3 December 2003 | Press for this site
This site has been named as the best specialist weblog for 2003 in the Guardian’s second annual “British Blog Awards”. There’s also a full list of of winners and more about the awards.
I should also point out that some people have problems with the whole idea of weblog competitions, and I agree with many of the sentiments. But obviously not enough to stop me from entering.
Anyway, I’ll do a quick roundup of 1660/2003 in the new year, but in the meantime, thanks to everyone who’s helped make the diary and the site come alive over the past twelve months (whether you’ve annotated or just read, that’s you!).
26 comments | Permalink | Thursday 18 December 2003 | Press for this site
A couple of people have pointed out this very nice review of the site in Christian Science Monitor. It seems more clueful than most reviews.
Be the first to comment | Permalink | Wednesday 24 December 2003 | Press for this site
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).
Unfortunately, a couple of hours before polling closed, Gaiman posted a reminder about the awards on his site and his many fans swiftly saw him add around 1,500 votes before it was all over.
When one is ahead in votes like these then the award seems like a perfectly judged validation of a site’s quality. But as soon as someone overtakes the whole thing seems easily dismissable as a trivial popularity contest! No matter, it was a lot of fun, and congratulations to all the other sites who were also nominated. Ultimately the award is only a reflection of how many readers a site has and how much the site owner is willing to encourage them to vote (I suspect McSweeney’s would have been first or second if they’d linked to the awards).
On the final day of polling Hans Dekker of the Wordsy weblog interviewed me about Pepys’ Diary and the awards and he’s just posted the edited half hour MP3 on his site. I hope you find it interesting listening!
5 comments | Permalink | Saturday 10 November 2007 | Press for this site
The site has been mentioned favourably a few times in the press recently, mainly due to its inclusion in Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks from the Wild Web by Sarah Boxer (Amazon US, UK). Here’s a quick summary for those who are interested.
‘Short Cuts’ in the London Review of Books:
The best of the lot, though, is the diary of Samuel Pepys, which a web designer called Phil Gyford has been posting in daily instalments since 2003, using the text already online at Project Gutenberg. It doesn’t exactly not fit in here, which rather puts paid to the whole idea that there’s something ‘distinctly bloggy’ about the style of blogs.
‘A Book of Blogs?’ in Newsweek:
Take the most striking example. In “Ultimate Blogs” you’ll find excerpts from the Diary of Samuel Pepys, a 17th-century English naval administrator and member of Parliament. Beginning Jan. 1, 2003, a Web designer and programmer named Phil Gyford began serializing Pepys’s diary online as a blog. The result is a fascinating experiment and a wickedly fun read. But why include it here? The Pepys (pronounced peeps) diary was originally published as a book. Yes, it was neat to see how it translated to the Web. But now, for reasons that are never explained, here we have it in book form again. Dizzy yet?
‘Blogs Without the Links’ in the New York Times:
Diary of Samuel Pepys, a blog that is run by the Web designer Phil Gyford and consists solely of entries from the renowned diaries of the 17th-century Londoner Samuel Pepys.
Unrelated to the book, the site also gets a mention in ‘High-Design Bible Draws Attention’ in the Wall Street Journal:
The diary of Samuel Pepys has been turned into a blog, with daily entries corresponding to the 17th-century original, at www.pepysdiary.com. The creator, British actor Phil Gyford, says the site gets around 35,000 unique visitors each month. “I thought I’d like to read the diaries, but the 10 volumes were a daunting prospect,” he says. Transmitting it as a blog “seemed obvious,” he says.
And finally, we’re described as one of the ‘50 Best London Websites’ in this week’s issue of Time Out, the London listings magazine:
If blogs had existed in the seventeenth century, Samuel Pepys would have had one – and it probably would have looked a bit like this. It’s a pet project by web consultant Phil Gyford in which Pepys’ diary entries are presented in real time, starting in 2003. It’s an odd approach, but makes the man’s work digestible and rewards daily visits.
5 comments | Permalink | Wednesday 20 February 2008 | Press for this site
Yesterday there was an article in the Sunday Times about Pepys’ Diary, as well as the George Orwell Diaries and the posting of Pride and Prejudice to Facebook.
[UPDATE: Pride and Prejudice isn’t actually posted to Facebook, but has been written in the style of Facebook.]
It reads a bit strangely to me, in that you could almost be forgiven for thinking this site has only recently begun, rather than being around for six years. And it also makes me wonder why these journalists apparently never get in touch with me when they’re preparing these articles.
3 comments | Permalink | Monday 9 March 2009 | Press for this site
This afternoon I was on BBC Radio Scotland’s Book Café, talking about the Pepys’ Diary website. I doubt I said anything you don’t already know but I’ve made an MP3 of the segment you can listen to.
I can only say that I felt more excited than I sound!
Here are links to some of the other things mentioned:
Be the first to comment | Permalink | Monday 23 March 2009 | Press for this site
The second half of this article about Pepys on the Indian website Business Standard discusses this site:
In 2003, a quirky and enterprising young web designer named Phil Gyford realised that Pepys’s diary was tailor-made for the Internet age. So he started putting it online: as a blog. Every day Gyford uploads a new entry to PepysDiary.com, exactly as Pepys wrote it, and on the same calendar day. Thus, on his website, now seven years into the diary, it is January 9 of both 1667 and 2010.
In the way these things work, Pepys has now collected his own 21st-century community — a cohort of dedicated Pepys followers who await their daily dose of the 1660s. Because much about 17th-century London is opaque or mysterious to the modern reader, Gyford designed the blog so that knowledgeable readers could annotate each entry on their own. Every Pepys entry draws a train of comments, and out of this small space a community has grown.
I find this fascinating. It well reflects modern patterns of Internet-based fannish sociability — many strangers communing over an abstraction. Yet it also reflects Pepys’s own times, because the readers become amateur scholars and conversants. This reverses decades of academic specialisation; yet it highlights the academicisation of so much of our public discourse. Most of all, however, it’s amusing to note that we citizen Netizens can be so harmoniously collegial only about something in the distant past.
Also, there’s an article in the Times today which features a walk of Pepys’ London by historian and TV presenter Dan Cruickshank.
Be the first to comment | Permalink | Saturday 9 January 2010 | Press for this site
I was on a TV programme on BBC One in the UK today, The One Show talking about Samuel Pepys and diaries. I was only on briefly, but here’s the video if you want to see (I start around 40 seconds in):
I wrote a bit more about the filming on my personal site too, if you’re interested.
2 comments | Permalink | Thursday 13 January 2011 | Press for this site
Last weekend this site was mentioned briefly on the Click programme on the BBC News channel. It’s been repeated during the week and I recorded one of the broadcasts. Here’s the brief segment that tries its best to make a website full of text look as televisual as possible:
It’s a nice little piece, and with a brief but prominent appearance of Jeannine Kerwin’s byline!
Be the first to comment | Permalink | Saturday 5 March 2011 | Press for this site
The end of the diary got a few mentions in the on- and offline media, and here’s a brief summary of it. I didn’t go looking for publicity because, although it feels like a big event, there didn’t seem much point attracting lots of new readers to the site just as it ends!
A little while ago my friend Russell Davies wrote a nice piece about the site in the UK edition of Wired magazine:
In the world of Twitter and Instagram, [the project] looks even more quixotically patient and focused. And that’s why the completion of Pepysdiary.com should be celebrated — it teaches us that the internet has power over other dimensions than the Social Graph and the Real-Time Web, that web success can be built with things other than venture cash, spammy PR and rapid scaling. Pepysdiary.com has a community because people found it, hung around and started contributing.
A week ago, the Portugese newspaper Publico had an article about the site in their magazine, after the writer, Isabel Coutinho, exchanged a few emails with me. I don’t think it’s available online, but I’ve put up a PDF (360KB) of the Portugese article, or a mostly comprehensible English version via Google Translate:
The daily reading of this version [of the diary] on the Web, in addition to the original text there hiperligations, notes, comments and access to discussions (which were born there), make the text more readable. “Do not make much sense to try to transform my website into a book - it works because of its links, maps, the possibility of making comments. A version of this daily published by Latham & Matthews already very good and has detailed notes-lhadas and much background information,” said the Briton.
And then, in the final couple of days there was a little flurry of coverage. Jason Kottke wrote a post on his blog, which is only a paragraph but his site is popular enough to send a lot of visitors our way:
More than nine years ago, Phil Gyford started publishing The Diary of Samuel Pepys online as a time-shifted blog…perhaps the first of its kind. During that time, each entry in Pepys’ diary was published 343 years after Pepys originally wrote them. In time, a popular Twitter account was added. The final entry will be published tomorrow (May 31), which is when Pepys suspended his diary in 1669 due to poor eyesight. Congrats on the run, Phil!
(For the sake of completeness, we received several times that traffic via a single word link on Dutch site Geenstijl (contains nudity!) and a single-line comment on Fark. I’ll do a final post about site statistics another day.)
Next, the Daily Dot posted two articles about the end of the diary. The first announcing the end, and the second after they’d got hold of me by email for some quotes.
Gyford’s decade-long project was not only successful in its completion, but in its ability to pave the way for similar archival projects. We know now that Gyford’s project has become the prototype for dozens more of its kind, from the live-tweeting of the Titanic to the Orwell Diaries.
The Los Angeles Times’ books blog, Jacket Copy also had a brief post about the diary:
Gyford added notes and created a system whereby readers — some of whom surfaced with deep expertise in Pepys and his period — were able to annotate freely. It has been an entertaining and marvelously ingenious time warp — but it’s almost over.
And finally, perhaps the longest article is by Justin Ellis at Nieman Journalism Lab, the bulk of which is the transcript of a conversation we had over Google Chat:
Ellis: Does Pepys translate well into tweets?
Gyford: Yes, I think so. Actually, at first I was thinking I’d just use Twitter to post a link to that day’s diary entry, because a lot of people seem to use Twitter for sharing links. Then I thought I should add a little quote with the link and then I realised I should just make it completely “in character” and be nothing but quotes from the diary as if it was Pepys tweeting. I think it works very well. To be honest, I’m not sure I’d have stuck through all of the diary-as-blog as a reader — I just wouldn’t be interested enough to cope with the length, when there’s so much else to read online. But I like the tweets a lot, how they slip into your daily routine, and give an impression of someone going about their daily business at the same time as everyone you know.
I’m not aware of any forthcoming articles so that probably wraps up the site’s press coverage!
3 comments | Permalink | Sunday 3 June 2012 | Press for this site
