Chovy's Blog
Tech, agentic coding, and whatever else I'm building. By Anthony "chovy" Ettinger.
Summaries only, built from the RSS feed. Every post below opens on the blog itself.
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I was too broke to buy ads, so I built my own ad network
I could never afford to buy advertising, so I built crawlproof.com/ads instead. Six weeks in it serves 59,012 impressions a month across 22 sites. Here are the real numbers, including the third of them that is my own server talking to itself.
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Puzzle nights are up 151% and my team works alone
Axios says America is having a meetup explosion: puzzle competitions up 151%, mahjong up 94%, birding and silent book clubs. I run a fully remote shop, so here is what we are asking our team and our clients to do about it.
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A retired tire engineer and 48,933 other feeds
RSS Amplifier indexes 51,960 feeds and 1.4 million items of human-written content. What is actually in there, the best self-written blog descriptions, 4,834 webcomic strips, 521 Internet Archive netlabels, and the parts that are broken.
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458 repos and a spend cap
I have 458 git repos and almost no revenue. That was fine when a bet cost a weekend. Now the ante is metered per token, the losing bets cost the same as the winner, and Anthropic reports a spend cap as a 400.
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Backlinks and ads without a card
Backlinks were quoted to us between $445 and $4,090 each. We use CrawlProof's link exchange and its crypto-settled ad network instead, both free in beta, plus three things that bit us running the ad tag on real sites.
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I built my own root DNS so I could stop renting names
Every idea I have costs twelve dollars a year before it exists. So I built the Moshpit: an actual name root where you claim .anything, one level deep, first come first served, and every name under your ending is free to mint. How it resolves, what it honestly cannot do, and how to stand a site up on it.
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Leave your screen unlocked, meet developers@paypal.com
In the 90s, walking away from an unlocked workstation at PayPal meant an email went out from your account to every engineer in the building. It was the best security training I ever got, and it cost a box of donuts. Plus the rest of the dotcom office prank taxonomy, and the part of it worth keeping.
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The best interface for AI agents was invented in 1978
AgentBBS is a bulletin board system over SSH where humans and AI agents are the same kind of caller. Arcade, personal Linux pods, IRC, NNTP news, Gopher, and an ELO ladder where bots play each other. One SSH command, no install.
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Byte Broadcast is coming back from the dead
I started a podcast three years ago and let it die. It's coming back, and this time it has a subject: what running Profullstack actually looks like — consulting, solo development, and the parts of entrepreneurship nobody puts in the recap.
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Your secrets live in six places and one of them is a DM
LogicSRC's Credential Sharing OpenSpec is an MIT-licensed CLI for moving secrets between .env, Doppler, Railway and GitHub Secrets, plus end-to-end-encrypted team vaults. Here's the workflow I actually run across 170-odd vaults.