Build notes
What I learn building web data tools, WordPress products, and AI agents, and running real websites on them. Real numbers, including the experiments that failed.
AI & Automation
17 Checks Every AI-Written Article Should Pass Before It Goes Live
The nightly audit I run on 1,581 AI-assisted articles: technical SEO, data accuracy, broken pieces, and the style tells that make AI content look careless.
Read article →Claude Code for Solo Founders: What I Actually Ship With It
Using Claude Code as an engineering partner: what I built with it, how I use memory, skills, and subagents, and the rules that keep it honest.
Read article →How I Automated a Twice-Daily News Video With Python, ffmpeg, and Local Text-to-Speech
A pipeline that reads 22 sources, has an AI editor pick and fact-check stories, then renders a narrated video with karaoke captions at no per-video cost.
Read article →How I Run 8 Niche Websites as a One-Person Team With AI Agents
The pipeline behind 1,581 articles on 8 sites: keyword plans, live product data, LLM drafts, nightly audits, and one human who owns the rules.
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WordPress
A 51-Point WordPress Website Checklist: Speed, Security, SEO, and Legal
The checklist behind my free WordPress inspector: 9 speed, 12 security, 20 SEO, and 10 legal and email checks, with why each one matters.
Read article →Build vs Buy: Why I Wrote My Own WordPress Theme and Plugin
A 10-site license became a ceiling, so I built a compatible WordPress plugin and theme from scratch. The decision, the design, and the security fixes.
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Engineering
Building a Self-Hosted Web Scraping API: Lessons From 14,000 Requests a Day
Why I replaced a paid scraping vendor with my own crawler, how it measures success honestly, and what 14,190 requests taught me about cost.
Read article →Hosting 8 WordPress Sites and 7 Apps on One VPS With Docker
How I run 8 isolated WordPress sites and 7 apps on one 6-core server: container layout, memory limits, Cloudflare, nightly security checks, and pitfalls.
Read article →Measure Before You Optimize: 5 Experiments That Did Not Work
Brotli that made pages 6x heavier, IPv6 rotation that got a whole /64 blocked, and three more ideas that sounded smart. Real numbers from a crawler.
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Building in Public
From Internal Tool to Paid Product: Pricing a Data API From Real Costs
How my internal crawler became the DatPilot Data API: cost per request, prepaid packages, refunds for failures, and free credits without abuse.
Read article →Why I'm Building AI-Native Software for Entrepreneurs
How running content websites turned me into a software builder, why I founded DatPilot, and what this blog covers: build notes and real numbers.
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