Here is the coolest blog I’ve come across lately: it’s 340 years old. Someone called Phil Gyford has taken the text of Samuel Pepys famous diary from Project Gutenberg and is posting it as a weblog. Reading it day by day seems to make logical sense, but with a good ten years of material to go I’m not sure if I’ll last the distance without reading the rest as a conventional book.
The bonus here is in the annotations that can be made on each entry, as well as the cross referenced people and places. So far this seems to have added an extra dimension to the site. For example, today in 1660 Pepys' account of the night’s entertainment runs thus:
[…] after a good supper, there being there my father, mother, brothers, and sister, my cosen Scott and his wife, Mr. Drawwater and his wife, and her brother, Mr. Stradwick, we had a brave cake brought us, and in the choosing, Pall was Queen and Mr. Stradwick was King.
The annotations for this day, contributed by readers (some more knowledgeable than others) explain that this was a celebration of “Twelfth Night”, and what this was about and what a “brave cake” was. There’s a lot of cultural context missing these centuries later.
The site is a quite creative use of the weblog form, and promises much interesting and instructive reading in the years to come.
