Here are the three guided walks in PDF format:

• City and South Bank walk (432K)
• Westminster walk (467K)
• Greenwich walk (354K)

I’ve updated links in previous Site News posts to include links to all these new files.

Many thanks, once again, to Glyn for his work on these very detailed walks. They’re worth a read even if you’re nowhere near London!

Diary, Encyclopedia and annotations

The complete Diary had 3,434 entries posted over its nine years and five months, and it has accumulated 58,603 annotations. That’s an average of 17 annotations per Diary entry, a figure that’s shrunk over time (it was 19 in January 2010 and 20 in July 2008).

Here’s a tiny graph showing the number of annotations posted over the past four months, which makes the end of the Diary quite obvious:

The Encyclopedia now has 4,790 topics and has 9,425 annotations, an average of about two per topic. Here’s a graph of those over the past four months:

Of those 4,790 topics, 2,694 are people and some of them have the small portrait images that appear over their links in Diary entries. Here’s an image which shows all the people who do (and don’t) have their own portrait (click to see it bigger):

More than half of the 4,790 Encyclopedia topics, 2,549, contain content from Wikipedia.

In-Depth Articles has 256 comments and Site News has 1,297. Added to the 4 annotations in Letters that makes a total of 69,585 across the whole site.

There are now something like 56,642 hyperlinks between words in Diary entries and topics in the Encyclopedia.

Visitors, page views etc

Looking at April 2012 (as May was unusual), the site had 57,397 Visits from 28,297 Unique Visitors (i.e., different people), resulting in 134,723 Page Views. The average visit duration was 3m 11s. Of those Visits, 44.44% were “new” (i.e., people who hadn’t been before).

Looking at the data since 16 November 2005 (the earliest I have Google Analytics data for), it’s surprising how consistent every one of these measures has been. There has perhaps been a very gradual reduction over time, but it’s hardly noticeable.

Here are two graphs, showing the changes over time (click for larger versions):

Unique Visitors, by week (see also by day or by month):

Pageviews, by week (see also by day or by month):

(The drop to zero in 2007 is due to a technical error, probably on my part.)

Here’s a map showing where Visits have come from since 16 November 2005 (5,034,512 Visits):

This table shows the top 25 countries in terms of number of Visits, again since 16 November 2005:

I think this table shows that around 48% of visits were one-offs, with that person not returning. But we can also see that nearly 40% of people visited 9 or more times. (I’m a bit hazy about this table, so I may be misinterpreting it.)

This chart shows where people came to the site from, since 16 November 2005. I think Direct Traffic is people visiting from a bookmark or typing in the URL, while Referral Traffic is people following a link from somewhere other than a search engine (which is Search Traffic):

Here are the top 25 things people searched for on search engines to get here (numbers in brackets are the number of visits for that search term during since 16 November 2005):

1. samuel pepys (169,964)
2. pepys diary (111,732)
3. samuel pepys diary (77,251)
4. pepys (69,504)
5. diary (42,916)
6. [not provided] (26,302)
7. the diary of samuel pepys (10,816)
8. diary of samuel pepys (10,408)
9. samuel+pepys (9,985)
10. pepysdiary (9,662)
11. pepysdiary.com (8,452)
12. www.pepysdiary.com (7,476)
13. diary entries (6,257)
14. diary entry (4,915)
15. pepys diary online (4,888)
16. whitehall palace (4,845)
17. pepys+diary (4,686)
18. samuel peeps (4,598)
19. cuckold (3,53)
20. my wife (3,314)
21. samuel pepys diaries (3,203)
22. pepys’ diary (3,002)
23. lady castlemaine (2,984)
24. pepys diaries (2,747)
25. elizabeth pepys (2,705)

Here’s a chart of which web browsers have been most popular for visiting the site over the first half of 2012:

And, because web browsers have changed over the years, I collated the same chart for every year from 2005 and made this graph. I ended up omitting most of the browsers that were clustered at or below the 1% share mark, leaving the four most popular:

(2005 is only based on 16 November to 31 December, and 2012 is based on 1 January to 4 July.)

 RSS feeds and email

Next, a summary of how many people read the site via RSS or email. The main Diary feed has 1,990 subscribers, the Story So Far feed has 85 subscribers, the Encyclopedia 78 subscribers, Site News 110 and In-Depth Articles 54. By the end of the Diary 391 people were receiving the entries by email.

These are mostly quite a bit lower than in 2010 and this graph, showing the number of subscribers to the Diary feed since October 2007 does look a bit strange:

I’ve no idea why things changed so much from 2011, including one big sudden drop in March 2011.

Twitter

The number of people following @samuelpepys continued to grow steadily, right up to the end of the Diary, and he currently has 31,398 followers. I suspect that there isn’t much overlap between the people who followed the fragments of Sam’s diary on Twitter, and those of you who read the full diary entries via this site.

And that’s it! If there are any other figures you’re interested in which I haven’t covered, let me know and I’ll see what I can dig out.

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!

Added overlays to maps

In any of the maps on the site (like this one) there is now ‘Pepys overlays…’ button at the top-right. Clicking this lets you switch on three overlays to give a better idea of aspects of Pepys’ London: the route of the City wall; the area that was damaged by the Great Fire; and the area that London’s buildings covered. I’ve tried to be accurate but it’s not like accurate historical research! The extent of buildings is particularly rough, but hopefully gives an idea of scale.

 Added Annotations to the exported data

When I originally created a computer-readable export of lots of the data behind the site, some people hoped I would add annotations, because they’re such an important part of the whole experience. I’ve now included these (increasing the size of the zip file from 8MB to 20MB!).

Improvents to first three months of the Diary

When this site started I wasn’t as rigorous as I am today about adding links from Diary entries to Encyclopedia topics. But I’ve now been through the first three months’ worth of entries and brought them up to the standard of recent entries.

Fixed the pop-up tips on iPad etc

The little panels that appear in Diary entries when you move your cursor over a link have always been a problem on devices like iPads — they would never disappear. They should now work better: Touch a link to make the panel appear, then touch elsewhere for it to disappear. Or touch the link again to go to that page.

Added references to letters

Although Encyclopedia topics show when that topic was referenced in Diary entries, there was never a similar feature for when a topic was referenced in Pepys’ letters. Now there is, for example on the page for Erith in Kent, which was mentioned in three of the letters from John Evelyn we have on the site.

Added diary references to Pepys’ wealth

While we’ve had a page that graphs Pepys’ wealth over time, it didn’t have references to specific Diary entries. Now it does.

Added a Whitehall Palace map

I’ve added a category to the large maps that groups all the individual places Pepys has mentioned in Whitehall Palace.

Tidied up the list of London taverns

The Encyclopedia page that lists taverns in London had got rather confused, with many taverns from elsewhere in the country. Now it only includes London locations, with the others now on the Rest of Britain page (which could probably do with some reorganisation itself).

And that’s all! I wish I’d done some of these a lot sooner, but you can’t do everything at once. Hopefully they’ll be a benefit in the future.

Thanks to Pauline Benson on the discussion list for this idea!