Pepys' Diary starting again

My nine-year-five-month project of posting Samuel Pepys’ diary entries, day-by-day, finished in May 2012. As 2013 gets going, the whole thing is rolling back to the start and beginning again.

The website has been completely rewritten, although it’s currently less complete than the previous one. All the diary entries from the previous run-through are still there but the front page and RSS feed are updating in real time again, starting with 1st January 1660.

The @samuelpepys Twitter account is also starting from the beginning. While starting the website’s diary again doesn’t involve any of the laborious work (adding thousands of hyperlinks to the text) this time round, these early tweets all need some preparation. Twitter didn’t exist when the project began (can you even imagine such a time?!) so the first few years were tweetless. But this is a less onerous task than the diary text preparation.

Tell all your friends!

(At some point I’ll write more about the rapid Christmas holiday project of extracting the website from the crusty claws of a decade-old Movable Type installation into the modern robotic hands of Django.)

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2 Jan 2013 at Twitter

  • 7:03pm: @russelldavies You probably know it, but just in case, Billy Bragg’s ‘A13, Trunk Road To The Sea’: youtube.com/watch?v=QO_CT3…
  • 6:58pm: @migurski @bobbiejohnson Oh yes, hot wax, not hot glue. Pasting up a page with hot glue would get messy.
  • 5:14pm: @chrislunch So I hear.
  • 5:12pm: @monkchips @mattb I hope there is such a thing… A frequently-updating Spotify playlist of his favourites would be good. No pressure Matt :)
  • 5:11pm: @willsh Thanks, I'll have a look!
  • 5:01pm: Having avoided Twitter over Christmas I've missed any links to good 2012 best-of music round-ups. Any suggestions?
  • 5:00pm: @bobbiejohnson 1995 here too, at Bristol Evening Post. Scalpel, hot glue, black tape for borders and column separators.
  • 3:01pm: @gwire I didn't read about Big Fat Quiz in the newspapers, so thanks for letting me know there's some joke I should be outraged about.
  • 12:05pm: @alruii Have you endorsed him for anything yet?
  • 11:44am: @pixellent @gwire It's true, you're not crazy for that reason!
  • 11:35am: @gwire I was thinking that the other day, when pondering an iPad Mini as an iPhone replacement. Can't quite ditch the "phone" part yet.
  • 9:57am: @iamdanw He didn't know the difference between .seconds and .total_seconds(), the bufflehead.
  • 9:11am: @LillyLyle If only he'd tweeted the correct things!
  • 9:09am: RoboPepys already malfunctioning. Suspect operator error in the new software.

2 Jan 2013 in Links

Music listened to most that week

  1. Frank Ocean (16)
  2. Mala (14)
  3. Macy Gray (14)
  4. Oneohtrix Point Never (12)
  5. Jean Grae (11)
  6. Fiona Apple (11)
  7. Tracey Thorn (8)
  8. Brian Eno (8)
  9. Actress (5)
  10. Burial (5)

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