A WORTHWHILE WEBLOG:

'Why I turned Pepys' diary into a weblog': If the diarist Samuel Pepys were alive today, he may well have used the web to record his thoughts. So Phil Gyford has turned his daily musings into a weblog. (BBC, 2 January, 2003)

When the idea of making a website out of Samuel Pepys' diary first occurred to me it seemed so obvious that I was worried someone would beat me to it.

For nearly 10 years from 1660 Pepys wrote about his experiences day by day: his own intriguing private life, his professional rise through the ranks and important events of the day such as The Great Fire and the Plague.

This journal of both large and small scale events often happens in public view today, on weblogs. Known as blogs, a few years ago these sites were the sole domain of web geeks but now an ever-increasing number cover thousands of topics.

Copyright isn't a problem; the remarkable Project Gutenberg, a community effort to make electronic texts of copyright-free books available to everyone, has produced a version of the diary dating from 1893. This Victorian edition misses out a few of the juiciest phrases but it is free to use and comes with explanatory footnotes.

One of the reasons for the recent boom in weblogs is that the tools to create and manage them are generally free and increasingly easy to use. I chose Movable Type because it allows readers to post comments next to each entry.

It all seemed too perfect: this could be a fascinating site and would be simple and cheap to create. I couldn't believe I was alone in thinking this, so I didn't tell even my closest friends about it.

After a few months thinking about how best to tackle it, I spent a few weekends and evenings creating the site, which was ready a week before Pepys' first entry on 1 January.

Although the diary text came with footnotes, these assume a level of knowledge about British history, geography and language that few have in the 21st Century.

This is where the ability to post comments on the site has proved crucial. Entries and footnotes are already being annotated by readers who provide explanations and additional information, creating a more communal experience than conventional publishing allows. So rather than simply publishing a dead - albeit fascinating - text, I now find myself in charge of a far more exciting living read.

This is a brilliant idea.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 29, 2004 8:13 AM