My First MOZ Programming Project Will Be Emailed Screenshots

by Mike Levin

Getting started with Moz. How does this go? Well, I have a project I stepped up for which is getting to know every data source enough to say a few smart words about it. Instead, I need to figure out how to tackle that project. There is a grid for me to fill in. But I think it should be a sort of interview. Why does this data exist? What are the issues surrounding such data? What do the collection histories look like and on what medium with which products or services?

But here’s what I want to do. I want to make an overture to the SEO community, offering a bit of cool FOSS SEO capabilities. Notice, I don’t say a FOSS SEO product, even though I do pitch my Pipulate.com a little bit that way. No, I want to teach people how to do stupid data tricks (in the spirit of David Letterman’s stupid pet/people tricks). There’s a lot of really cool, valuable data tricks you can do these days that will make you very valuable to a very wide array of potential employers or customers, be you an in-house person or an SEO agency, large or small.

I can teach a few tricks. It runs local on your machine, be it a Mac or a Windows laptop. It can go out and do stuff on the Internet, like visit a website and take a screenshot of that website and email that screenshot to you daily so you can get in the habit of monitoring some thing.

That’s the baby-step. That’s the tiny first step from which so many other useful things grow. I think I need only get peoples’ laptops in general working that way without too much effort, and we’ll be receiving plenty of ideas about building it as the next step. And we can build it together, collaboratively.

• Fast-track from the maybe want to be more technical to technical & powerful
• Advocate looking directly at the search results daily to look for patterns
• Create something cleverly nicknamed as the first technical project to help do this

Already I can see this is too many words. Simplify!

• THE PITCH: Stuck in Excel & GSheets? Envy the automaters? The time is right!

• PREMISE: Things are different. Linux won & can run on your desktop like a server.

• THE ASK: Target a generic Linux server as a durable, interoperable automation platform.

• FACT: Such a platform while used under Windows or Mac can exist broken off on their own.
• FACT: You can start out on a Windows or Mac laptop, but all knowledge is transferable.

• FACT: Transferring to a durable, interoperable layer makes you durable and interoperable.

• METHODOLOGY: All projects reduced into clearly laid-out baby-steps.
• METHODOLOGY: Each step should be built-up based upon the prior.
• METHODOLOGY: How a project is built is immediately obvious, as are dependencies.

• Start out with the premise that everyone’s on a Windows or Mac laptop.

• Start out by observing well. This leads to a screenshot project.