This report covers not only the root directory but all subdirectories.
NOTE: If you have a tool or method for monitoring changed Webpages, this is the only page that you need to monitor on this Website, because it will always point to all other recently changed pages where the cause of the change was something other than correction of a typographic error or addition of an external Weblink.
2025/07/24 - BAD NEWS: On this date, the hosting company for this Website (HostMySite) migrated it to a new platform (HostWay), but did not fully explain in advance all of the impacts of that migration. Consequently, the updates for 2025/06/30 and 2025/07/21 (see below) disappeared temporarily, and other strange things may have happened. Watch this page for news of their restoration.
2025/07/21 - Added an entry for a newly discovered American bellfounder (Wishart Bros. & Brubaker) to the Research Notes for the Goeppinger book; added new research notes to the same page for the known foundry of J.C.Harrington, and made a few minor editorial corrections in various other places on that page.
Expanded the history of the Vanduzen bellfoundry.
In support of the major policy change announced on 05/08 (see below), revised the last list of "sites that are no more" for conventional bells (North America) and provided 88 site data pages (see list) for defunct sites in this region (some previously listed only in PDFs).
Revised the "Direction" note block which follows (and floats in this page):
|
"To travel far, you must choose a direction" 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.
/signed/ Carl Scott Zimmerman, database owner |
2025/06/30 - Fixed 2 bad links in BellFoundries page
2025/06/02 - Updated the worldwide summary of carillon keyboard ranges, and slightly revised some of the related regional keyboard indexes.
Revised the introduction to unrelated essays.
2025/05/27 - Revised 44 site data pages and added 1 (see list or map); revised affected indexes and regional maps accordingly.
2025/05/08 - Revised 199 site data pages and added 10 (see list or map); revised affected indexes and regional maps accordingly.
Updated links to the NAGCR Website for all extant North America rings.
Implemented a major change in policy and organization:
Previously, defunct carillons and chimes
(those which no longer exist for various reasons) had no site data pages;
each one had only a brief entry in a "_no_more" page,
and that entry was referenced only from the appropriate bellfoundry index(es).
Going forward, those sites will (eventually) have site data pages that
differ from ordinary pages by having a pink background with an appropriate watermark.
Those pages will usually have no locator information
other than the ordinary place identification,
and therefore no site locator maps, but each will be referenced from both the
appropriate bellfoundry index(es) and the appropriate "_no_more" page.
This change will also provide for more consistent display of Weblinks related to
places of historic interest.
Some of those "defunct" site data pages actually describe sites that
have a few surviving bells (perhaps even a great bell or two); these may eventually
be changed to non-defunct pages in accordance with the policy change
dated 2025/01/17 (see below).
In support of that major change, revised most of the lists of "sites that are no more", as follows:
and provided 78 site data pages (see list) for defunct sites in those regions (some previously listed only in PDFs).Added another name to the Hanks-Meneely genealogy.
2025/04/17 - Fixed clustering in the map of Belgian traditional carillons.
2025/04/10 - Fixed clustering and labeling in two North American maps.
2025/01/25 - Fixed an erroneous historical date in the BellFoundries page.
Added a new essay.
2025/01/23 - Fixed many broken internal links — not surprising in view of the size of the previous update.
2025/01/17 - Revised 171 site data pages and added 21 (see list or map); revised affected indexes and regional maps accordingly.
Implemented a major change in policy:
Previously, no installations with fewer than 8 bells were entered
into the database, even though there was no technical reason not to do so.
Eight bells could span a diatonic octave, making that a reasonable criterion
for the minimum size of an instrument capable of playing music.
Going forward, sites with fewer than 8 bells may be included
in the database if their characteristics make them equally interesting.
Such a characteristic could be a baton keyboard, inclusion of a great bell, etc.
However, this expanded criterion for inclusion does not change any definitions
of terminology in use here.
Following that new policy, existing handmade pages for five South African rings of fewer than 8 bells have been replaced by database-generated pages, and are included in the itemization above. A few of the new pages in the list and map referenced above also fall into this category. (See also 2024/11/09 below.)
Implemented a major change in the organization of site indexes:
Previously, most of the Nordic countries (Norway, Sweden, Finland)
were mixed in with the rest of mainland Europe; only Denmark had its own set of indexes.
(That was because Denmark has more carillons than any of the other Nordic countries.)
Because that arrangement was not convenient for the members of the
multi-national Nordic carillon society (NSCK), the various European site indexes have been
reorganized to put all of the Nordic sites together under the heading of Scandinavia.
This is similar to what has long been the case for North America
and for the British Isles.
If you find any inconsistencies in this new pattern of indexing, please use the email
link at the bottom of the affected pages to notify the Webmaster so that they can
be corrected.
All site data pages affected by this reorganization have had their
back-links to indexes revised appropriately, but if there were no other changes then they
are not included in the itemized list and map linked above.
Note that summaries for Denmark and Europe have not yet been revised
to fit this new pattern.
Changed some site tags for consistency of style, without changing their indexing.
Fixed 18 bad site locator map links (not itemized).
Added external links to numerous site data pages (not itemized) without altering the database.
Expanded the page about the author/editor/owner of this Website.
2024/11/16 - Split 2023 news into the separate history file referenced below, to save space here.
Added another unrelated essay.
2024/11/13 - Fixed indexing and regional mapping of the only traditional carillon in Finland.
Converted all remaining index pages and some others to UTF-8.
Fixed several broken internal links (not enumerated).
2024/11/09 -
Regenerated 637 site data pages for traditional carillons
and baton-keyboard chimes around the world (not enumerated or mapped)
to show transposition in terms of the resulting key relative to C.
(It was already shown as the number of semitones up or down.);
updated locator maps to latest version as needed;
revised display of North American telephone area codes
without changing revision dates in the database.
Included in that number were 20 site data pages
(see list)
which had not been previously published and announced
after their database entries were updated.
Mea culpa!
Replaced three old handmade pages for the independent 6-bell rings of North America
with similar pages created from the database
(see list) after verifying that the present database
system can in fact hold instruments made of fewer than 8 bells.
Provided missing links to an existing page about 5- and 6-bell
rings in Australia and New Zealand;
through an oversight at its original creation in 2013,
it has until now been accessible only from regional locator maps.
Improved the page about the standard format of site data pages.
Revised the page about Website maintenance to reflect progress toward a future version of TowerBells.
2024/09/21 - Revised 67 site data pages and added 3 (see list or map); revised affected indexes and regional maps accordingly.
Removed the site data page for the University of the Cumberlands, Williamsburg, Kentucky, after discovering that its tower contains nothing but bell shells and loudspeakers.
Replaced links to the lost ARPAC Website (in France) with links to the equivalent archived pages on the Wayback Machine (not itemized).
2024/09/01 - Revised 38 site data pages and added 24 (see list or map); revised affected indexes and regional maps accordingly.
Added a video of the great bells of Markham, Ontario
2024/08/29 - Re-authorized Apple Maps, after the previous certificate expired unexpectedly.
2024/08/19 - Updated instrument counts in a variety of regional locator maps (not enumerated).
Revised the page about standard format to explain "Tower details" more fully.
2024/08/16 - Updated the figures in the worldwide summary of instruments by country and type.
Revised the geographic list of indexes to traditional carillons to show the association of the member societies of the World Carillon Federation with each country or region.
Added a new index to traditional carillons in Belgium, this one sorted by region (corresponding to the purview of the two carillon societies in Belgium).
2024/08/12 - Revised 40 site data pages and added 23 (see list or map); revised affected indexes and regional maps accordingly.
Added an entry to the page of North American sites that are no more based on newspaper evidence of a chime made by Andrew Fulton of Pittsburgh PA.
Revised the page of European sites that are no more to restore access to the similar page for Germany, which has been revised with the solution of the mysterious location of "Kruesinsee" (actually Krössinsee).
Added to the Olsen Foundry index page an obituary for Ole Christian Olsen Nauen (1939–2024).
Revised the Search page to explain a quirk in Google's indexing methodology, and to provide a workaround that might be helpful in some instances.
Updated the autobiographical page for the author/editor of this Website.
Added another unrelated essay.
2024/05/22 - Revised 51 site data pages and added 3 (see list or map); revised affected indexes and regional maps accordingly.
Added a province code list to the index by province for Italy.
Added a former great bell in Belgium plus two great bells in Spain to the list and table for Europe.
Revised the explanation of special characters slightly.
Removed partition tags from site locator maps for sites in Germany.
Added recently discovered external links to a variety of site data pages (not itemized).
2024/03/24 - Revised 148 site data pages and added 29 (see list or map); revised affected indexes and regional maps accordingly. This included mapping mobile instruments to their home cities, as well as finding the actual locations of three instruments which previously were identified only by city; their files were renamed.
Added the definition of "bell metal" to the Glossary.
Added the carillon of Jasna Góra Monastery (Częstochowa, Poland) to the list of degraded instruments in Europe, and added its four great bells to lists and regional locator maps.
Changed the status of the Deagan tubular chime in El Paso TX from unknown to gone; revised affected indexes and regional maps accordingly.
Revised some of the text of the page about Instrument Type Abbreviations in Indexes to clarify usages of key words.
Revised the Observations in the Summary of carillon keyboard ranges worldwide.
Revised the maintenance page slightly, with the important addition of a Postscript about the future of the database.
2024/03/23 - Updated Apple Maps authorization token.
2024/01/11 - Revised the Glossary statement about hybrid carillons; supplied a new index to hybrid carillons worldwide, and standardized dual indexing of those instruments as both traditional and non-traditional (with "hybrid" tags).
Revised the index of travelling carillons into a main page plus three indexes, each listing all known mobile instruments in a different order; added a worldwide map of such instruments.
Expanded the page about special characters to explain more fully the encoding methods that we use. That also tells what you should do when you observe erroneous characters anywhere.
Added a new project to the essay on philanthropy.
2024/01/01 - Added a new page about Website security, prominently linked from the home page; removed two previous "new" items there.
Revised the list of foundries to make it more useful.
[Tower Bells Introduction] [Website Map] [The builder] [What Is New]
This page was created 2000/03/02 and last revised on the topmost date above.
Please send comments or questions about this page to csz_stl@swbell.net.