Soon after that, I felt maybe I should do some more with this great free web space I had. Of course, I didn't want to simply duplicate something that had already been done. I had to fill a niche. (I feel sorry for people making personal web sites five years from now; there will be no niches left empty.) I didn't want to make a page for a single band, since most of the bands I would do that for already had excellent pages. Nor did I want to make a metal index, since there are plenty of those, much better than anything I could do. I chose the middle ground. Taking about a dozen of my favorite bands, I wrote reviews of those bands and their albums. I felt this filled a vacant spot, since most band pages don't really describe the music or compare the individual albums of the artists. Many people want to hear opinions, even if they are very subjective, before they go out and buy music.
I also liked the idea that a person could find a new band at my site. They could stumble upon it by looking for information on one of their favorite bands, and in their travels around the pages find another group that sounds interesting. In that way, The Power of Metal is a sort of metal hub, where people can come in on one band and leave on another. The leaving is also a key feature. The majority of my pages are a mere supplement to existing sites. I provide little general information about the bands, no discographies, interviews, pictures, etc.; that can and should be found at more dedicated places. There are a few exceptions (e.g. Scanner, Iced Earth) in which dedicated sites did not exist, so I've done my best to provide a little more than I usually would.
Soon after I started creating reviews, the idea for what I think is the most important feature of my site came to me. I live in a dorm on the wonderful campus of The University of Illinois - Urbana and all rooms there have a high-speed Ethernet connection direct to the Internet. This allows any student with a PC and a little effort to create his own webserver. Through two University accounts, I have 8MB of space available, but with my own PC, I have hundreds of megabytes. I decided to put that space to good use and make hours of digitized sound samples available to the world. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so I figure a sound is worth at least eight hundred.
Unfortunately, for this to all work properly, my computer has to be connected and functioning at all times. Thus, most of the sounds weren't available last summer when I was home from school, and worse, will probably be gone forever after the spring of '97. I'll probably be living in an apartment after that, leaving behind the one good feature of the dorms. So, download, download, download! And enjoy exploring the power of metal.
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