The Sunday Side Projects

Sunday should have its own discipline: the lunch that stretches, the shutters lowered against the afternoon, a book left open on the table, the slow administration of nothingness. It should be the day when things stop demanding attention for a few hours. Then there are those who turn on the computer just to check one thing. A small thing, a detail, a webhook. I belong to this unregulated brotherhood, made up of people who at four in the afternoon say "it will take ten minutes" and by nine in the evening discover that someone, without consulting them, has turned off the sun.

GPulse was born this way. Not from an industrial plan, nor from market research. No group of consultants studied the competitive quadrant of tools for Ghost CMS. There were no forty-seven slides, three graphs lacking units of measurement, and a green arrow pointing towards the paradise of recurring revenue. There were only some of my sites built with Ghost and some functions that I needed. I had created them over time for personal use, like building a shelf because the books keep falling. Then they remained scattered among repositories, scripts, configurations, and notes. Living things, but without a common home. At some point, I decided to gather them in one place. That place became GPulse.

Translate without disguising

The first function is GPulse Translate. The need was simple to articulate and less simple to satisfy: to publish content in multiple languages without turning the site into a puppet show of surface translations. Many services translate a page while the visitor looks at it. It’s a legitimate solution, but often the translation remains a kind of transparent film laid over the original content. The reader sees a different language, while under the hood there continues to exist only one page.

GPulse Translate follows a different path. When an article or a page is published or updated, the system creates a real translated content in Ghost. The new version has its own address, its own slug, the language tag, the hreflang references, and its own presence in the sitemap. It’s not a mask, it’s content. It can be modified from the administration panel, corrected, integrated, and managed like any other post. Translations can live on the same site or be distributed among different Ghost installations.

For those managing multiple international publications, it means avoiding one of the oldest liturgies of editorial computing: copying, pasting, changing windows, losing a paragraph, correcting the wrong site, and finally wondering why the Spanish version still contains a sentence in German. It doesn’t eliminate editorial work. It eliminates a considerable part of the stupid work. And often this is the best function of software.

Notify search engines

The second function is GPulse IndexNow. When content is published or modified, Ghost sends a signal. GPulse receives it and informs compatible search engines that that address has changed. It doesn’t promise to conquer the first position by the next solstice, doesn’t interpret the coffee grounds of SEO, and doesn’t sacrifice keywords to the deity of the algorithm. It does something more modest and, precisely for this reason, useful: it automates a part of the digital pipeline. Instead of waiting for a search engine to randomly revisit a page, it is informed that something has happened.

It was a function I wanted for my sites. I designed it, developed it, connected it to Ghost, tested it, and finally turned it into a service. At that point, the comedy intervened.

The punctuality of the bridge

Shortly after building GPulse IndexNow, I discovered that IndexNow was about to become a native function of Ghost CMS. It’s one of the great classics of independent computing. You build a boat, design it, choose the wood, set up the sail. You paint it, give it a name, prepare a bottle to break on the bow. You invite relatives, friends, and two seagulls interested in the buffet. Then, just as you are about to set sail, the municipality inaugurates a free bridge. The bridge has four lanes, a bike path, night lighting, and probably even a slushie dispenser. Your boat remains there, elegant and slightly perplexed.

So yes: it’s possible that I built GPulse IndexNow almost for nothing. The project was born with the melancholic dignity of a retiree receiving the notice on the first day of work. But that "almost" is important. Managing multiple Ghost sites, I will continue to find useful a single dashboard from which to monitor connections, submissions, errors, and statistics. A native function solves the problem within a site. GPulse, on the other hand, allows you to observe different sites together.

Above all, IndexNow forced me to build the infrastructure on which Translate now lives. Authentication, connections with Ghost, webhooks, site management, processing queues, checks, and administration panels: everything that seemed necessary for a small product destined to be surpassed became the ground on which the next one could grow. The boat may not cross the river, but the wood was used to build a house.

The value of side things

Side projects often work this way. They arise from a tiny annoyance: a repetitive procedure, a missing link, information that needs to be copied every time. At first, they don’t seem like projects, but small insubordinations against wasted time. Then they become code. The code becomes a tool. The tool, sometimes, becomes a product. Other times it is surpassed by a native function, a new platform, or someone who had the same idea six months earlier and a marketing department with shiny shoes.

It doesn’t necessarily mean that the work was useless. A project produces at least two things: what it does and what it teaches to do. The first can become obsolete. The second remains in hand.

GPulse was born to solve problems I had on my sites. Today it collects those tools and makes them available to those using Ghost CMS and facing the same needs. It may grow. Perhaps some functions will be absorbed by Ghost. Perhaps others will arrive, born during a Sunday when I promised myself not to turn on the computer. It’s the risk of things built for real. They don’t just exist in presentations. They meet the world, and the world sometimes responds by copying them, surpassing them, ignoring them, or finding them a utility we hadn’t anticipated.

That’s why Sunday side projects are not wasted time. They are research done with hands.

GhostPulse Translate
https://gpulse.it/translate/

GhostPulse IndexNow
https://gpulse.it/indexnow/