Hello friends. It has been several months since the last blog update, and I feel that it is, in a sense, long overdue. Let me begin by saying that I hope you are all safe and healthy – and if you are not, I wish you the grace and fortitude to surpass the uniquely difficult times in which we now find ourselves. I know they have been difficult for me. A BIONICLE fan-site blog is perhaps not the most fitting place to discuss somber world events, but I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the tragic juxtaposition between the optimism displayed in my New Years Day post, and my now solemn greeting in June. I knew that 2020 would be a challenging year. But not in my wildest, most paranoid fantasies could I have predicted the surreal upheavals we have experienced within the span of five short – yet unbearably long – months. I don’t think I’ll ever forget reading this uniquely relatable tweet from March:

I’ve now been alive in six decades:

The 1980s
The 1990s
The 2000s
The 2010s
The 2020s
March

— Sam Spencer (@choosesam) March 22, 2020

But on to happier thoughts. I hope that this site, for those who have an interest in it, can serve as a welcome diversion as we wait for happier times. I can tell you that there has been a distinct increase in traffic to the Official Greg Discussion Archives since late March/early April. And boy, I’ve noticed that people have been getting a lot of mileage out of the line selection feature – that’s great! In the meantime, I have continued chipping away at some necessary upgrades to the main Great Archives site that I have had in mind for a long time.

First, the main site overall has a slightly updated look, one that I hope is more appealing, intuitive, and pleasant to read.

This comes with a number of small quality-of-life improvements. Hovering over a citation link now shows a popup with information about the cited material, no longer requiring you to jump to the bottom of the page to see it.

Many citations also have links to articles with more information about the cited media. The content in those articles needs more work, but the important thing is that, behind the scenes, we have more advanced citation machinery in place that will make doing fancy things much easier in the future. That said, there are a few new articles that you might find interesting, such as the list of LEGO Magazine issues, or the catalogs of text content from the official BIONICLE websites in 2001, 2002, and 2003.

Some pages also have hyperlinks to other articles, which was not available before.

You can also click on the icon next to any section heading in an article or timeline to get a hyperlink to that specific section.

There are more updates on the way. Adding more images to the site is high up on the list.

What do you think about these changes? Is there some feature in particular that you would like to see next? Let me know at @GreatArchives.