The Diary of Samuel Pepys - Site News

2024 Update

Phil Gyford — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 09:55:55 +0000

Here’s a quick look back at some figures from 2024, for anyone interested.

There are currently 20 people who contribute something towards the site each month, via the Ko-fi page, and 26 more made one-off contributions. Thank you to all of you. This site isn’t about making money, but being able to pay the costs (below) and more really helps.

Costs

Each month the costs are roughly as below, almost exactly the same as last year:

Item	Company	Cost	Notes
Web and database server	Mythic Beasts	£41	Also hosts two other, less popular, websites
Daily diary emails	Buttondown	£20
pepysdiary.com domain	Mythic Beasts	£1
@samuelpepys on Mastodon	Heroku	£4
Media file hosting	AWS S3	£0	A fraction of the £1 I spend hosting several things there
Discussion group	Groups.io	£0	Should cost £21 but we have an old, free plan
Transactional emails	Sendgrid	£0	e.g. password reset emails
Web analytics	Cloudflare	£0
Code hosting and deployment	GitHub	£0
Uptime monitoring	StatusCake	£0
Error logging	Sentry	£0
Total		£66

Some stats

Over 2024 the site had 1,362,740 page views, and 800,630 “visits”.

In December it had 106,330 page views, and 57,530 visits.

Over the past 30 days, 41% of visits came from the US, 30% from the UK, and 7% from Canada.

2,666 annotations/comments were posted across the site during 2024, 126 less than in 2023.

There are currently 1,595 people who receive diary entries by email every day, 259 more than in 2023.

The discussion group has 671 members (26 more than in 2023) and 305 emails were posted (163 less than in 2023) to it during 2024.

@samuelpepys on Mastodon currently has 5,683 followers, and @samuelpepys.bsky.social on Bluesky – new in 2024! – has 3,585 followers.

Thanks everyone

Thank you all for your contributions and just enjoying the site for another year!

I started adding a few more letters to the site in recent months but ran out of time – there are plenty more on the way, which I’ll try to add over the coming months, for those of you wanting more Pepys than the diary alone can provide.

All the best for 2025/1662!

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Restoring Pepys's presses

Phil Gyford — Sat, 28 Dec 2024 15:55:56 +0000

Recently, Bainbridge Conservation, a London-based business, has been working on stabilising and repairing Pepys’s bookcases (or “presses” as he called them) at Magdalene College. They contain his thousands of books and manuscripts, and need to be moved temporarily during building works.

They documented some of the process on their Instagram account and have kindly allowed me to share the photos from the two posts here.

6 December 2024:

In January 1667, Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary, “The truth is, I have bought a great many books lately to a great value; but I think to buy no more till Christmas next, and those that I have will so fill my two presses that I must be forced to give away some to make room for them, it being my design to have no more at any time for my proper library than to fill them.”
By his death the collection was 3,000 printed books and manuscripts in 12 presses, or bookcases, arranged by size. He left the library to Magdalene College with the conditions that it be left exactly as-is, no books rearranged or removed. The furniture team has been working to stabilise the presses and dismantle them to move them temporarily out of the library while major building works are carried out (see link in bio for more on this and the fundraising appeal). Luckily the bookcases were designed to be taken apart, but this still required repairs to loose and detached elements of the woodwork, removal of panels attached to the back in the 1970s as a fireproofing measure, and repairs to the glass doors.

6 December 2024:

To stabilise the breaks in the glass doors on Pepys’ bookcases, we brought in Tiago Oliveira. He lightly cleaned the broken glass panes and break edges, then had a tricky job of aligning the misaligned sections within the wooden doors. He held them in place with strips of sellotape and then dotted conservation-grade clear epoxy resin over the break edges. Capillary action sucks the adhesive in place. This procedure both ensures the safety of the glass panes, making opening and closing the door less risky, and also improves the appearance of the break: the resin minimises the mirror effect on the break edges, making it less noticeable.

All photos copyright Bainbridge Conservation. Visit them on Instagram.

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Samuel Pepys now available on Bluesky

Phil Gyford — Tue, 24 Sep 2024 17:31:37 +0000

You can now get updates from Pepys’ diary throughout the day if you use the Bluesky social networking app/website. Find him as @samuelpepys.bsky.social or at bsky.app/profile/samuelpepys.bsky.social.

He’s also still available (with identical posts) on Mastodon as @samuelpepys@mastodon.social or at mastodon.social/@samuelpepys.

He stopped posting to Twitter last year.

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