TheOneRing.net would like to welcome you to the brand new website! Before we review some of the new highlights, we owe you an explanation of just what happened and why we’ve been offline for the last few days.
While we wish we could say we had some exciting Hobbit Movie announcement as the reason we were offline, the real reason was nothing so glamorous.
TheOneRing.net experienced a catastrophic hardware failure. All of TheOneRing.net, and its many subsites (TBHL, KongisKing.net, etc), were completely lost, with no hope of a restorable back-up. (Yea, we were pretty shaken by it too!) Why this happened, we are not 100% sure, but much like the determination of hobbits, we weren’t going to let this keep us down.
TheOneRing.net Staff went into overdrive – While one team of staffers tackled the task of trying to retrieve the old data, another team tackled the reality of creating a brand new website as soon as possible.
We are proud to announce that after a miraculous three days of scrambling, both teams have succeeded in their goals. We now have a brand new stable website and we have restored access to the ‘old’ website.
The new TORn has some great new features:
- A brand new look, without completely tossing out the old TORn you grew to love.
- Easily navigable categorized news (RSS feeds for each category coming soon!)
- A much quicker and stable website
- The ability to quickly share TORn news with friends/blogs/news services via the ‘Share This’ link
- A handy dandy event calendar to keep track of upcoming Tolkien events as well as the daily news (We will also be adding the Middle-earth Calendar shortly)
- A more stable and accurate poll
- Quick and easy searching of the news database (We’ll be adding the last 10 years shortly!)
- Easily enhanced with widgets and plugins from WordPress
The evolution of TheOneRing.net is not over. We are going to adding a few enhancements in the next few days as well as still developing the look and feel of the new site. We will be adding all of our archived news from 1999-present and we hope to switch over the Scrapbook to our new website as soon as possible. In addition, you will see things change here and there while we continue to get used to our new ‘skin’ so to speak.
As I mentioned below, the ‘old’ TheOneRing.net was recovered, and still able to be surfed and enjoyed by the masses. You can find the ‘old’ TORn at http://archives.theonering.net.
We’d like to thank the entirety of Tolkien fandom for their patience and support during our revival. We hope you enjoy the new TheOneRing.net and we look forward to many years of celebrating Tolkien fandom together.
