Today we debut our long-overdue web store — aka the Slicing Up Eyeballs Merch Table — and, to inaugurate it, we’re introducing a selection of three different buttons, one bearing the Eyeballs logo plus two featuring era-appropriate illustrations of cassette tapes.

Android users: Your long national nightmare is over, as today we launch the much-requested Android version of the handy Slicing Up Eyeballs app, perhaps the easiest way to stay on top of the latest album and reissue news, tour dates, streaming music and video, and more from your favorite artists.

Five years ago today — at precisely 10:37 p.m. MST on Feb. 20, 2009 — Slicing Up Eyeballs launched so very inauspiciously, with just a simple 91-word post announcing plans to provide “the latest info on new albums, reissues, upcoming reunions and tour dates.”

Well, we didn’t quite get this in before the end of the year, but, hey, the first day of 2014 is as good as any to look back at 2013 and tally up what people have been reading on Slicing Up Eyeballs over the past 12 months. The answer: News about The Replacement and Peter Murphy, plus a whole lot of Best of the ’80s results posts.

Next time you find yourself at a fine establishment featuring one of AMI Entertainment’s digital jukeboxes, be sure to check out the “Best of ’80s College Rock” playlist the company asked Slicing Up Eyeballs to help compile, featuring dozens of great tracks from Kate Bush, Hüsker Dü, The Cure and more

We interrupt our regular programming for a bit of housekeeping: Version 1.1 of the Slicing Up Eyeballs iPhone/iPad app is now available in Apple’s iTunes Store if you’d like to upgrade your existing version or purchase it — 99 cents — for the very first time and help support what we do here every day.

We’re thrilled to announce today the official launch of the brand-new Slicing Up Eyeballs app for iPhones and iPads — now the easiest way to stay on top of the latest album and reissue news, tour dates, streaming music and video content both new and delightfully vintage from all of your favorite ’80s alternative artists.

Four years, 3,149 individual posts, 2 million unique visitors, 6.4 million total pageviews. But out of all that, what are the most popular headlines on Slicing Up Eyeballs since this site launched on Feb. 20, 2009? Well, as you can see from the list below, they involve news about Nirvana, The Cure, U2, R.E.M., The Smiths and Depeche Mode.

At exactly 10:37 p.m. MST on Feb. 20, 2009, Slicing Up Eyeballs launched so very inauspiciously, with just a simple 91-word post announcing plans to provide “the latest info on new albums, reissues, upcoming reunions and tour dates.” Exactly four years later, this site has become so much more than that.

We’ve come to the close of another year, which means it’s time to tally up what people have been reading on Slicing Up Eyeballs over the past 12 months. A lot of posts about Depeche Mode, it turns out. While the band only logs one entry in the Top 10, they’ve got six headlines in the Top 20 — a good year from the boys from Basildon.

Had a great opportunity this past week to guest-blog on USA Today’s pop-culture hub Pop Candy while Whitney Matheson is out on maternity leave. Below is a collection of those posts if anyone cares to take a gander, spanning such pop-culture goodness as “Star Wars,” Record Store Day, “Doctor Who” and the demise of INXS.

Slicing Up Eyeballs is going on vacation, taking Mrs. Eyeballs on a 10th anniversary trip to an exotic foreign land. While we won’t be abandoning our vigil entirely, the next week will see only sporadic posting, with regular features mixed with periodic news round-ups.

We’ve got some big news today on the radio front: Slicing Up Eyeballs — that is, yours truly, site founder/editor Matt Sebastian — has been asked to host “Dark Wave,” the Sunday night show that explores the “darker side of alternative” on satellite-radio network Sirius XM’s classic-alternative station 1st Wave.