What's new in these pages?

"To travel far, you must choose a direction"
William F. Woo, "Letters from the Editor" (chapter title)

The direction in which the TowerBells Website is traveling can be seen in the worklist which is set out below.  In roughly prioritized order, this shows the major tasks which the author has set himself, and which are intended to result in future news items on this page.

• Work on migrating from the present offline flat file database (see this page for details) to a modern online database.  This is a major project, with many components, so details of what needs to be done and what has been accomplished will not be listed here.
• In support of the major policy change announced on 2025/01/17, review all defunct sites to determine whether any should instead be regarded as degraded, having some surviving bells still in use (e.g., as a clock-chime).  Likewise, review all great bell installations to determine which of them are accompanied by other bells that should now qualify for presentation on a site data page.
• Solve the problem of why WordPerfect does not preserve the width of spaces in fixed-pitch fonts; this is preventing the production of correctly-formatted PDFs from the database that underlies this Website.
• Identify (and if possible correct) all entries where an instrument has an Extended phase but not a Foundation phase.
• Solve the problem of why Map Service Select does not always pass through a map request when it should automatically do so based on previous settings.
• Post to the site data pages all additions and changes reported by correspondents, found in publications, or discovered from Google Alert messages, revising indexes, locator map links and regional locator maps as needed.
• Improve the new Error 404 handler to redirect requests for deleted site data pages automatically.  (It already tells human visitors why they are no longer present.)
• Construct a page that describes and illustrates the various types of keyboards, chimestands and chiming racks that are in use in various parts of the world.
• Finish mapping independent great bells already listed in Europe, Russia and Asia-Pacific (Oriental profile).
• Investigate anomalies in various summaries, as well as discrepancies between instrument counts in summaries and the corresponding indexes.
• Enhance the statistics and/or filter panes on regional maps with respect to type of instrument, type of institution, denomination.
• Extend the Google site locator map functions to show (additional) nearby sites at the user's request.
• Move existing photos in site data pages from Links block to Photos block.
• Search my photo archives for relevant material which can be posted to site data pages, including photos contributed from others which should have been posted already.
• Regenerate all site data pages older than July 2012 for single-phase sites for which information exists about auxiliary mechanisms and/or tower details.
• Add numerous entries to the lists of great bells for continental European countries.
• Write an essay on HTML maintainability, for the guidance of those who don't appreciate the necessity of it and the subtleties involved.
• Find and fix obsolete links to the Global Gazetteer.
• Supply all of the "planned" items listed on the Data_Top page.
• Review the index to the work of miscellaneous bellfoundries to determine whether additional bellfoundry-specific indexes should be constructed.
• Regenerate all Summaries that are more than a year old.
• Actively hunt for information to resolve various "unknown" details (foundry, year, weight, number, keyboard ranges, etc.), including location and status of Deagan tower chimes that are not yet mapped.

/signed/   Carl Scott Zimmerman, database owner