Site News

News about updates or problems with the site, and other Pepys-related news.

A new Pepys walk: Greenwich

Glyn Thomas has previously worked on two walks which have been posted here, around the City of London, and Westminster. He has now updated both of these and added a third walk, around that other centre of Pepys’ diary life, Greenwich.

Here are the three guided walks in PDF format:

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!

2 comments | Permalink | Wednesday 18 July 2012 | Events

Site statistics 2012

I promised several of you that I’d give a final update on statistics, now that the diary’s ended. It’s been two-and-a-half years since I last gave a detailed update, so let’s so what’s changed…

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):

samuel pepys (169,964)
pepys diary (111,732)
samuel pepys diary (77,251)
pepys (69,504)
diary (42,916)
[not provided] (26,302)
the diary of samuel pepys (10,816)
diary of samuel pepys (10,408)
samuel+pepys (9,985)
pepysdiary (9,662)
pepysdiary.com (8,452)
www.pepysdiary.com (7,476)
diary entries (6,257)
diary entry (4,915)
pepys diary online (4,888)
whitehall palace (4,845)
pepys+diary (4,686)
samuel peeps (4,598)
cuckold (3,53)
my wife (3,314)
samuel pepys diaries (3,203)
pepys’ diary (3,002)
lady castlemaine (2,984)
pepys diaries (2,747)
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.

9 comments | Permalink | Thursday 5 July 2012 | Statistics

Family Tree v3

I’ve give the the family tree a probably final update. I’d been planning to give it a tweak — filling in some of the post-diary dates, and adding a couple of people who appeared late in the diary — but I’ve also now added a lot more Montagus. There’s now a new chunk featuring the eminent family, Pepys’s distant relations, on the right-hand end. It’s quite a confusing family — there are several Edward Montagus for example — so having them displayed like this helps make things clearer!

1 comment | Permalink | Thursday 5 July 2012 | New features

Recent Press

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!

5 comments | Permalink | Sunday 3 June 2012 | Press for this site

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