Greetings and Happy Thursday my Friends, I’m excited to share the news that today is the 14th birthday of the PiercingMetal website. So much has changed here since we first announced the domains existence to the masses some 5,110 days ago and I am happy to also say that it’s been busier than ever at the Metal Media Command HQ in terms of things to do and share with those who find our voice interesting to them. Legacy readers might remember the visual down below when the premise was a lot more simple and straight forward.

Back in 2005 it was only going to be reviews and photography but so many changes have happened since I brazenly referred to it as “New York’s Definitive Metal Resource” and quite honestly that was our Developers idea and no one wants to argue with the person building the thing so it stuck. I lined out a majority of the brands changes in last year’s birthday announcement (seen HERE for reference) and in the interest of time on a very busy morning for me, I will not repeat them. I will say that I did make some cosmetic changes and have filed all of our content under what amount to three distinct disciplines. There are Reviews, Features and Pop Culture sections and each of them bring worlds of awesome to your device of choice. As I compose this update for you, there are more than 6,200 posts to enjoy and I’ve scheduled 10 more to go live in the coming days. My plan is to push the content base past the 6.5K mark by the end of the year but a lot of factors are involved in doing something like that. Since news happens every day and I find myself toiling at the keys in response its probably doable even before the year ends so let the challenge begin. In any event, the new tagline going forward is “Where Heavy Music and Pop Culture Collide” and I feel it sums up what we are about even better than ever before.

Socially speaking, we are utilizing most of the BIG Social Networks to reach you but its a bit of a warzone out there nowadays. The world of Social Networking has become even more of a numbers game and with that being said we need ALL of our diehards to be all the more supportive of this stuff. Facebook is almost impossible to grow a brand in anymore because unless you pay to promote your posts and the readers must “like” and choose “see first”, otherwise they aren’t letting you see anything. Also, if you don’t like the posts or engage in any of the stuff on there, Facebook determines that you are not interested and pushes it farther back in your feed. Ugh. If you are already a fan of the brand on Facebook its imperitive for you to invite your friends to the mix. We’ve Tweeted more than 5K times but still haven’t mastered the medium but I have loaded up more than 7K photos to our Instagram and I love using that since its a little bit of everything. I don’t devote a lot of time on the YouTube Channel stuff but I do have something like “180” videos for our readers to enjoy, click “thumbs up” on and leave topical comments in the space allowed. I’d really like to do more with this channel but I’d want to make it interesting and not be like most of the junk that I see happening out there on so many channels. Subscribers are paramount for this one almost as much as on Facebook so please subscribe and start engaging.

I did fully delete the long-unused MySpace Profile for the website and decided to dump that Vero True Social as well since neither was sending any traffic to the domain. Both Tumblr and LinkedIn have brand accounts to act as a feed of website content so if you use those you can find us pretty easily. The Web lost Google+ just the other day and we shall miss sharing content to it for sure. The time to act is now if you want to help the words and visuals and ideas you find on the website to your interest. If I don’t know you are out there, the less time I will be spending on the networks and just will be working on the website itself. I’m happy to say that traffic has been incredible so far this year and I am just short of a half million pages viewed for the 2019 year on this anniversary date. With our being in the vast webiverse of 1.5 billion websites we’ll take it.

I still love having the calendar for you to peruse and make plans on but now that I am using a different software all of the way super old stuff is not present anymore. There are a total of about 2.7K posted events on the Events Calendar and while I don’t list everything that I find there are about 50 venues perused and added in. The calendar is a labor of love for sure. Most of our readers might not know that I originally only loaded the calendar software onto the site so I could keep track of what I myself wanted to see and then it just exploded. I view this as a collaborative effort since some of our most ardent readers remind me of shows I missed or that have changed. As long as its helpful in keeping the scene vibrant I will keep loading it up.

About The Photos: This years “14” photos found me playing with my food but in a different sense. The first one plays off the idea that I used to celebrate a 7th and 8th Anniversary and with the website hitting “14”, I had to be clever. I realized a full pie visual and one missing a couple of slices equaled the number that I needed. This is a Nino’s Pizzeria large cheese pizza pie BTW and our good friend Skeleton Peter Parrella helped me get the two visuals together since my little graphics app wasn’t able to. The second shot actually comes from my final visit to our neighborhoods Nathan’s franchise. They closed up after more than forty years in business and when I saw the table markers I got creative. As the site ages its getting harder and harder to come up with something weird to represent that ;p

I think I’ve said enough about all this stuff but the most important thing to say is “THANK YOU” if you have found some fun and some interesting things here on my website. Thanks to all of the media resources who help all of this stuff happen and the many bands that we are proud to call friends of the family at this point. Without all of you, none of this would be possible. The necessary links to find us on various things are below and now its time to start things up as I aim towards Year 15.

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