As loyal followers of the site are well aware, the original Main Page of PiercingMetal.com offered readers the opportunity to check out who we felt was the appropriate “Artist Of The Month” at a specific time. The section sat on top of the most recently added batch of reviews and when selected the reader would execute a search query that would run against all of the review content on the site and present them with anything that had been written about said artist on a page of its own. We also presented some light commentary of our own for good measure. The resulting list allowed them to pick and choose what they wanted to absorb about the artists CD or DVD releases as well as any Interview or Concert coverage we had done for them. It worked well but the downside of this became clear almost immediately based on the reality that one could have several hundred reviews on a site for a number of different artists but only a brief amount of content for each individual performer. That made the region problematic and it often went unmaintained since our core reason for being a site was to add reviews of whomever we could wrap thoughts around and whose releases we were entrusted to present a narrative on. Doing that for the readers was a little more important than worrying about a monthly artist feature to change. We liked having this on the site of course but in the end it became something that looked better on paper than in actual reality and even though reviews were added regularly you would seldom reach an acceptable amount to have a special page devoted to the particular artist. The other downside was the fact that there was no historical recap of it based on the way that the site flowed and this fact got me thinking about some changes when I began using WordPress for the PiercingMetal Musings Blog for some of the sites more difficult content and the features that I wanted to include.
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