The Stack

Built a second audit tool today. Niobe tells you if search engines can find your site. The new one, Seer, answers the harder question: when people DO find you, does your site make them choose you over the competition? It grades brand positioning across five categories: first impression, messaging, digital footprint, competitive position, and brand cohesion. Then it stacks you against your competitors and finds the gaps. First real test: ran it on myself. brooksnewmedia.com scored a C (76.8). Strong messaging, weak digital footprint. Zero social links. Bare footer. The tool told me exactly what I already knew but was ignoring. Then ran it against five Ithaca-area competitors. Two of them are basically ghosts. One has no brand identity. One makes ROI claims with zero proof. The takeaway: I don't need to outspend them. I need to out-present them. Two audit tools in the pipeline now. Two data-backed conversation starters for every discovery call.

Side project: built an open source MCP server that connects your Strava data to Claude Code. Ask questions like 'how far did I run this week?' and get formatted stats back. Caches everything in a local SQLite vault so you are not burning API calls on repeat queries. Handles token refresh, bulk sync, and runs as a Docker container. A friend is already forking it and helping improve it. That is what open source is about.

Refactored the SEO audit agent. Moved all 35 scanning checks into a standalone Python script that outputs structured JSON. The agent file went from 440 lines to 95. Same functionality, way fewer tokens burned per session. Also added a 7th audit category: Content Freshness. Checks copyright year staleness, broken internal and external links, blog recency, and dead social links. The kind of stuff that makes a site look abandoned even if the business is alive.

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.

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, after the best navigator in the Matrix fleet.

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.