Greetings my amazing friends in our readership audience and also hello to those new to the brand who’ve just happened by. It’s time for me to take a pause from the regular proceedings that we’re serving up to let you know that we have reached another website birthday. Yes, today marks the fifth anniversary of the Ken Pierce Media branding and it’s pretty cool to be sharing that as an announcement. You see, this was never really supposed to be what it has ended up being and more changes than can easily be quantified have taken place since launch and here we are. For this fifth website anniversary I’m going to take you through all of the building blocks to allow for an easier digestion of our history. I wanted to present this a little differently this time around and the revisiting helps me remember how much has changed from the original plan. Let’s get this recap rolling from the beginning which was a very simple bare bones Blogspot account.

When this idea came to my mind, I had felt that I could make a little extra money by guiding people out of the Blogger platform and onto something more malleable and functional like WordPress or Square Space. As most creative types know, Blogspot is not really considered to be the most powerful of options to do any kind of blogging or even establishing ones brand in a professional manner. A lot of people use it but there are more negatives than positives on this choice. The initial goal was to use Blogger as the scratch pad but after some consideration I felt that by posting to it I’d get more adept at it and be able too successfully guide potential clients away from it. This part of the puzzle still runs and today holds more than 2K links to stories on PiercingMetal, The Chronicles of Piercing Ken and even on the Official KPM WordPress. There’s been some thought about sunsetting this part once it reaches 3K posts but I am still pretty far away from that. The next part of the branding that would to come to be was via the Tumblr account.

Now the interesting thing about Tumblr becoming a component for this idea was that I already had an account and had been using it since 2011 for PiercingMetal. Initially, it used to feed off of our Twitter and the Facebook Page and I would even end up directing Instagram posts to it when that was something you could do by checking a box. Around the time that the KPM idea was framed out there was a belief that Automattic, the owner of WordPress, who now owned the platform, would somehow be moving the Tumblr accounts into WordPress. With PiercingMetal already being a long dominating presence on that platform I feared some sort of technical collision with all of our posts would come to pass. There were almost 5K posts in Tumblr at this time and it was a non-issue to change the account from PiercingMetal to reflect Ken Pierce Media and by doing so we could leave the existing content and continue to direct new stuff to it on a regular basis. Since this was following the same practice as the Blogspot, any new content on Piercing Ken would also be getting shared on Tumblr which I liked much more since Tumblr was capturing the same tags as the WordPress posts which helps Google find everything. At this point I was still a few months away from fashioning a WordPress version of it all but to protect this idea I secured a proper dotcom via GoDaddy and for the time being it was used on the Tumblr. Whenever someone typed kenpiercemedia.com they would be directed to the Tumblr account and its thousands of posts that would lead you to the two main websites. While I could have left well enough alone at that point, I am quite fastidious about things like statistics and with Tumblr not really having any and Blogger’s being terrible it was officially time to make the move from these other avenues into a proper WordPress installation.

Fortunately for me, when I decided to launch this idea into WordPress I was already quite adept at the medium and initially I began loading in the same posts that were found on the Blogspot that is referenced up above. The key difference was the adding in of the tags that were also used on each original post being referred to on PiercingMetal and Piercing Ken. I immediately preferred the flow of the content on WordPress over the rest of the mediums that had been used up until that time. When this part of the puzzle was done, there was a lot of speculation about whether Tumblr would remain active since it was purchased by Automattic (the owners of WordPress) and what would amount to the content that had been up there for many years. Fearing I might lose 12 years of posts, I followed the steps to import the full Tumblr into this new WordPress and overnight the five posts became almost five thousand. The upside to this was a wealth of posts right off the bat and the downside was almost five thousand posts to “clean” to reflect the standards. Though a lot of work is left to do on that angle, the posts from the two websites are still being featured on the WordPress and being kept up to date on the Tumblr and Blogspot. While I don’t believe that Google will ever sunset Blogspot its clear that they won’t be modifying and Tumblr….only time will tell if Tumblr is worth being kept online by Automattic. At the time of this fifth anniversary there are more than six thousand five hundred posts on WordPress and each day a little housekeeping is done on the imported legacy stuff. In time all of the legacy will be cleaned up but since it still reads well in Google searches I edit when time permits. It’s more important for new things to go live over editing the past.

To wrap up this lengthy missive I will share some of the other statistics with you readers. The full post count is actually 6.6K and counting and according to the server logs, we have achieved 2.4 Million Pages viewed since launch and something like 2.9 Million Hits. While hits are not the metric that they used to be based on technology changes, they are still valid as they reflect some of the online engagement that comes in. There are website owners that say they don’t count at all but those are usually from sites that no one visits in the first place. The Ken Pierce Media brand is very active on the assorted social media platforms and your participation on them with us is what helps the branding grow. Our main networks overall will be the TikTok, YouTube and Instagram and I do pop in on the Official Facebook and X accounts for good measure. I’ve listed a few things down below and all of the social media can be found via our Linktree. That’s also where the Ko-fi profile is and that is how we generate some much needed support for the enterprise. All of this stuff comes out of my own pocket and its harder and harder to keep up financially with things getting prices raised again and again. Any donations from the readership helps to keep the lights on for Ken Pierce Media and its other websites since its all relative when it comes to the costs. To wrap up this narrative I can say that it continues to be interesting. Some have asked would there come a time when this would be the only website and have the other two integrated into it and that is a definite possibility. Since one cannot merge social media profiles and YouTube Channels, that notion remains a theory over a fact. Many thanks to those of you who initially believed in it and are still rallying the charge five years later. There is so much more to come so strap in and let’s aim the sights on hitting 7K published posts. If you are someone that uses the Blogspot or Tumblr networks please follow the outlet there as it will also lead you to new content. Remember that as feeds sometimes older items get integrated into the mix. Many thanks to those of you who initially believed in it and are still rallying the charge five years later. There is so much more to come so strap in and let’s aim the sights on hitting 7K published posts. Kiitos.

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