What I'm shipping, learning, and figuring out. Published from the terminal.
Ran a full backup audit today. Found gaps: missing Docker volumes, no retention policy on one backup set, a dead service in the health check. Fixed all three, then wrote a disaster recovery runbook. Six phases, every command copy-pasteable. If the server dies, we rebuild from the NAS in under four hours. Next step: off-site backups to a remote server so a single point of failure does not take out everything.
Had a realization tonight. We were pricing our monthly plan way too low for what we deliver: dedicated hosting, 2 blog posts, weekly strategy calls, SEO reporting, maintenance, and priority support. We are delivering agency-level output. Pulled the pricing off the site. Moving to custom plans and targeting wineries, hotels, and tourism businesses in the Finger Lakes. Aim higher.
Rewrote the entire brooksnewmedia.com homepage and services page. New origin story about starting with BandsThatJam.com in 2007, the Buffalo music scene, GrassRoots Festival giving us our first photo passes, and the move to Ithaca in 2018. Services restructured around what we actually deliver: web design, automation, SEO, and a monthly growth plan with weekly strategy calls. Killed the old generic copy. This is our story now.
Wrote the entire Brooks New Media business playbook today. Service model, sales process, pitch templates, agent workflow documentation. The free SEO checkup form on the site is now the front door. Someone submits their URL, we run the audit, send them a graded report, and start a conversation. No cold calls, no spam. Just data that speaks for itself.
Ran our first batch audit: 13 Ithaca bars and restaurants. Average grade was a D. Most common problems: missing meta descriptions, no SSL certificates, broken heading structure, and zero structured data. One bar's domain had been hijacked entirely by a spam site. Chrome shows 'Not Secure' for another. These are real businesses losing real customers every day because of basic website issues nobody told them about.
Built a new SEO auditing tool today. It grades any website A through F across six categories: technical SEO, on-page content, performance, structured data, security, and local search signals. Runs a full audit in minutes. Named it Niobe.
Side project tonight: rebuilding BandsThatJam.com from Archive.org snapshots. This is where it all started in 2007. Concert photography, live show recordings, festival reviews out of Buffalo, NY. The site has been offline for a while, but the content still exists in the Wayback Machine. Pulling it back together as a showcase of where Brooks New Media came from. Every business has an origin story. This is ours, and we are not letting it disappear.
Why now? Because the old site was a brochure. It listed services and had a contact form. That is it. No story, no personality, no reason for someone to care. We started Brooks New Media because we loved music and wanted to help our community grow online. The website should reflect that. Not just what we do, but why we do it and where we came from. Buffalo summers, GrassRoots Festival, BandsThatJam.com, Giant Panda Guerilla Dub Squad, the move to Ithaca. That is the real story. Time to tell it.
For the first time in 15 years, we are rebuilding the Brooks New Media website from scratch. The old WordPress site has been running since 2009. It did its job, but it does not reflect who we are anymore. New stack, new story, new services. Starting tonight.
Built this site today. The Stack is a microblog for documenting what we ship. Static Astro site, dark theme, tag filtering, RSS feed, paginated feed. No CMS, no database. Markdown files, one per post. Build it, rsync it to the server, done.