GregF's Blog Added!
I’m pleased to announce that Greg Farshtey’s BZPower blog, GregF’s Blog, has been added to the Official Greg Discussion Archive!
On May 27, 2006, BZPower granted its Premier Members the ability to run personal blogs on its site. The same day, Greg Farshtey started his BZPower blog: GregF’s Blog, subtitled “From the Writer’s Desk.” Greg updated his blog regularly until November 2010, often posting BIONICLE storyline tidbits and behind-the-scenes details about his work on the theme. This included details about the big Mata Nui reveal in 2008, the biology of beings on Bara Magna, the element of Psionics, the script of the canceled fifth BIONICLE movie, the name of Toa Varian, and the unfinished story serials, just to name a few things. Now, all of these posts are available on the Official Greg Discussion Archives and have been fully integrated into its search engine!
The copy of GregF’s Blog on the OGD Archive better preserves the original formatting than the one currently on BZPower in some small ways. This is because the files used to reconstruct these posts were downloaded from BZPower in 2018, and BZPower has upgraded its forum software since then.
So, what’s next? For one, something that BZPower does have that the OGD Archive lacks is the comments section of each of the blog posts, which Greg often posted in. A natural next step is to integrate these into the site and its search engine too. For now, you can view the comments by clicking on the “Original Post” button at the bottom of each post, which will take you to the original post on BZPower, complete with comments.
After that, I do have a list of items I hope to add to the archive eventually:
- Ask Greg from the TTV Message Boards
- the Farshtey Forum from Mask Of Destiny
- miscellaneous BZPower topics and posts by Greg that still survive on web.archive.org, many of which have been located by Dag
- the BZPower topics posted by Erebus about Velika, the Red Star, etc.
- “Ask Greg” from the 2007 version of bioniclestory.com
- “Ask Greg” from the 2004 version of bionicle.com – which sadly seems to be permanently lost! If anyone has a record of this, please reach out on Discord!
- a transcript from an old chat between Greg and MaskOfDestiny in 2005 – thank you to Gonel for finding this!
- transcripts of audio interviews with Greg, provided by Gonel
- a collection of BZPower PMs with Greg sent in by Turaga of Force
You probably noticed that a lot of these items were found with the help of our friends in the Great Archives Discord. Speaking of which, I’ve implemented some suggestions by toaskello, Gonel, and Wolk to improve the UI of the search results page. I’d like to extend a big thank-you to everyone who has provided help and feedback, and I encourage anyone reading this to join our server and leave your thoughts!