
Twenty years ago today, on January 6, 2005, I registered the domain name Transformers-Universe.com.
That wasn't the beginning of my writing and publishing of toy reviews, of course. I had done a bit of that back in 2004 already, just some hand-coded HTML pages with a few pretty bad pictures of my recently acquired toys (mostly G1 and Armada at the time). The whole thing quickly grew in size, though, so I registered the domain in early 2005 and published my first website entirely dedicated to the Transformers in late February, using a PHP-based CMS that wasn't entirely brand-new even back then.
Over the years the site changed a lot, of course (see the pictures below), and I added quite a few functionalities, too, such as my ID Guide and Toy database (came online in 2009).
Some personal highlights:
- I was the first reviewer world-wide to publish reviews of the 2007 Transformers Movie toys, thanks to the Hasbro Movie 2007 Press Event I was invited to.
- My server nearly crashed in 2008 when, without even knowing it, I published the very first review of OTCC Nightbeat.
- As mentioned above, I added numerous functionalities in 2009, which have since grown into a Transformers toy database with over 9,000 figures inside it.
In late 2023 I was finally forced to retire that old PHP CMS from 2004, which had been the basis of my site for nearly two decades, and which I had extensively modified over the years. I migrated the entire site to the Joomla CMS, which went online on January 1, 2024 with an entirely new look (the current site).
Below you can find some screenshots of how my site has changed appearances in the last twenty years, courtesy of the Way Back Machine.
And so, on to the next twenty years of being the best bi-lingual Transformers site in the whole wide world. Roll out!