Dear BWTF Reader,
After several incarnations from its "acweb" days to its "NYU" days, it is time for BWTF to take a break. The site has gone independent once more and that means a lot of change will take place to the site over several months before I relaunch. In the interim, please visit any of these Transformers sites for great news and content:
Your encouragement and support over the past ten years has meant a lot to me. If you wish to contact me, please feel feel free to
Til all are one!
Benson Yee
February 6, 2008
Status Updates:
February 7, 2008
Thank you for all the supportive messages people have been sending. I do not want fans to think that I am shutting down BWTF permanently. That is not the intent of this shift. It is simply a time of change in terms of BWTF's hosting and internal structure. The old girl is in need of a refit I'm afraid and I'm trying to bring the site up to date as fast as I can. This is not permanent and in the next couple weeks I intend to find ways of staying in touch with fans as best I can. Hang in there folks!
April 9, 2008
I suspect that sometimes when you have a machine that is humming along dysfunctionally, it is no surprise that once you begin peeling back bits of metal and plastic coverings you discover the wiring underneath is quite a mess. It's worse if you tried to do certain things and the efforts were half hearted at best.
How does that relate to BWTF? Well, over the course of the decade I ran the site, I tried a variety of things. For a while I tried to post multimedia including desktop wallpapers and sound clips from the Beast Wars show. I tried to start a fan fiction section. I was one man trying to do too much, and I confess that at times the burden became a bit overwhelming to face day to day. Trying to recreate everything from scratch and relaunch the site is a daunting task, so I have come to the decision to rebuild only select portions of the site at first, with others added on at a later date. The focus of my site has always been toy reviews, and that is where I have decided to begin the major portion of my restructuring. I am still working on finding a good gallery system that is compatible with the CMS that I have chosen, so that might have to come at a later phase.
I must also warn ahead of time that I am unsure of what type of server load this new incarnation of BWTF will cause. I'm sure once I relaunch, a good portion of my regular readers will have dropped out already, but according to what I know of my hits on figures.com it was enough (at the time) to justify being on a dedicated server. This means another challenge I'm facing (both financially and technologically) is choosing a good service provider and deciding whether I go with a shared server or dedicated server. This ultimately means that even once I relaunch, the site may (or may not) be rather slow at first as I adjust the needs of the server to the demands of visitors.
That's it for this update. Thank you for the well wishes I continue to receive. If any of you are attending Botcon 2008, I'll be there with bells on and occasionally yelling out "Moo!". :)