It has been about five months since disaster struck Ben's World of Transformers. As you have been seeing on my social media channels, around May/June of this year BWTF suffered a major hardware failure. For the past five months I have been working on recovering the database, moving to a new (more modern) server and restoring hundreds of pages individually.
After many hours spent putting one page after another back up, I decided it was time to go live once again even though the restoration is far from complete. This "soft" launch is not an end point, but rather a beginning of a new chapter in the life of Ben's World of Transformers. There is still much work to do. Here's what to expect:
- I have restored several key Toy Review sections including "Universe" and a large chunk of "Generations". However, it will take quite some time before I have restored the rest of "Generations" and other sections such as the Unicron Trilogy. I will post updates as I finish chunks of these pages.
- Expect to find a lot of broken page links embedded in my old reviews until pages have been restored.
- Due to the nature of the new Drupal Template I am using, most of the images in my stories (including toy reviews and news items) will be in galleries at the bottom of the page. Some "feature" images will be embedded in the stories themselves. This differs from my old format and if I can find a way to go back to that format I will.
- The focus of the site for the next few weeks at least will be restoration of the "Generations" toy review section. I would like to get it restored as close to where it was when the old server crashed so I can begin bringing you new reviews! If I can squeeze in other reviews alongside those restorations I will certainly do so.
- My old news items were largely lost in the server failure, but I have been adding several news items over the last month or so with recent news so I can begin building up a "back catalog" of news item.
- My full time job has been exceptionally busy the past few months, but I will endeavor to provide news items as best I can. Don't forget to also follow me on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram for updates!
On a final and exciting note, you will note Ben's World of Transformers has a new logo! The Unicron and Primus illustrations were done by none other than Stephen Baskerville! Baskerville's association with Transformers goes back to the 80's where he did pencils and inks for the Marvel G1 title in the UK. It is an honor to have his artwork gracing my banner for this relaunch. If you are interested in a commission, you can check out his page here.
So welcome back to Ben's World of Transformers, everyone. I am happy to be starting this journey again with you and I hope this marks the beginning of many more wonderful years running this site. As a fantastic writer I know once wrote...it never ends!
Ben "Wonko the Sane" Yee