Why can't I find St. Lalluwy Doubles?
A lot of doubles 'methods' are in fact Variations - that is; standard
methods with not-so-standard calls. As the Method Maker engine won't do
calls, it is currently impossible to put these on the Archive using the present automated
system. You can however, find a good reference for Doubles Variations on Peter Hinton's Doubles Variations page (but no blue lines).
Why won't it display the line for Double
Darrowby?
The Method Maker engine won't (it's rather old now, and was never intended to cope with methods like that), but the other blue line formats will. Just use one of them instead.
What happened to version 4.0?
The short answer is that it was superceded by version 5.0 before it
went public. The long answer is below.
The VMA has evolved over more than 20 years as follows:
How does it work?
The Visual Method Archive is a cobbling together of four different
parts - a publicly-available database of methods (currently the Central Council Methods Library), a search engine and editing form which I wrote, and Jon
Brawn's Method Maker program,
which now runs on an NZ Server, after some sterling work by Edwin Hermann of Wellington, NZ. This follows previous work by Jon Warbrick and Exeter
University IT Services. The method database is downloaded, unzipped and
converted into html databases in a web-searchable directory using Excel, all under the
control of a macro I wrote. It's probably not very elegant but it works! If either of the
search engine or the method generating engine go down then the whole thing fails. As the
method blue line image programs are incomprehensible to one of my limited programming
ability, I can't make changes to the output of the Method Maker engine.
Will it do bobs and singles?
Only the BLUELINE format will show you bobs and singles. However, it doesn't show these for all methods.
Can I change the blue line bell?
You can't in the Method Maker, ringing.org and BLUELINE format pages. However the user-configurable Boojum format and the Composition Library format will allow you to do this (and select multiple bells' blue lines if you wish).
How up to date is it?
The method database shouldn't be more than a week old, as that's how often the source is updated, and I generally manage to get around to it every week. The date of the last update for a particular method stage is given at the bottom of the Method Maker format blue line page
What happened to lead ends and index numbers?
The VMA is designed to show blue lines in a variety of formats. Ancillary details such as Ringing World references and lead head codes have been deleted from the source database for simplicity. If you want full details you can refer to the Central Council Methods Library, but you
won't get link to a blue line (except for recently-named methods).
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This page written by Adam J. Beer .