PulseParmar family

Story

How Pulse got onto pulse.parmars.us

Sunil Parmar · Publisher

An open notebook and pen on a wooden table, waiting for the next page
The empty page is the point. The trips come next.

I have wanted a family site on parmars.us for a while — not a brochure, not a feed we would forget to update, just a place where the Parmars could keep the travel days and the quieter ones that never make the group chat. The meals. The wrong turns. The afternoon that was supposed to be a museum and became a kitchen. I did not want it to live only in my camera roll.

The fun part was the address. The family already has parmars.us. Pulse felt right as a subdomain: pulse.parmars.us. A heartbeat. A reminder to write things down while they are still warm. Not “blog.” Pulse.

I am technical. A lot of the family is not, or not in the “clone the repo and open a pull request” sense. If Pulse was going to work, writing had to feel like write, save a draft, look at it, then publish. No one should need a terminal for a typical post.

That constraint decided the stack more than any fashion in frameworks.

I sat down with Grok Bot, the desktop assistant, and talked it through the way I would talk it through with a patient friend who happens to remember every hosting footnote. We landed on things I still agree with:

  • Cloudflare Pages, free tier, static files. No rent for a server we would forget to patch.
  • Astro, so the public site is just pages and photographs — fast, readable, ours.
  • Sveltia CMS at /admin, talking to GitHub, so a relative can log in, write, save a draft, preview, and publish without learning Git.

Grok was useful for the boring-but-important choices: subdomain, Git-based CMS instead of a paid editor, Sveltia over Decap, drafts that stay off the live site until someone means them. I did not want a half-built toy. I wanted something we could actually hand to the family.

Then I used Cursor’s cloud agents to put the site into the repository at github.com/sunilosunil/pulse. That is the part I would not have enjoyed doing by hand on a weeknight: the pages, the theme, the admin config, the sample layout, the README that tells me how to connect Cloudflare once I log in. The agent did the scaffolding. I get to be the publisher.

If you are reading this on Pulse, that loop already happened. The code is in GitHub. The stories live as Markdown files. Cloudflare Pages is meant to build them whenever main moves. The custom domain is pulse.parmars.us — a CNAME, when DNS is attached, pointing at the Pages project. None of that needs to be anyone else’s problem except mine and whoever helps with the domain.

What I care about for everyone else is simpler.

Open pulse.parmars.us/admin. Write in your own voice. Save a draft if it is not ready. Preview it. Publish when it is. If GitHub asks you to sign in, that is the door, not a test. I will invite family as collaborators on the repo so the CMS is allowed to save your work.

I hope we share the trips, obviously. The long drives and the markets and the hotels with ice machines that become a joke. I also hope we share the days that are not “travel content.” A rainy evening. A recipe that traveled in a side pocket. Someone’s first version of a place the rest of us have already written about, because the point of a family journal is that we do not have to agree.

There are a couple of sample stories still in the archive so the layout has something to wear. They are labeled. They are not our memories. This one is the first real post: how Pulse got onto the web, with Grok for the decisions and Cursor for the scaffolding, so the Parmars have a pulse on parmars.us.

The next pages are yours. Put the stall that made us late. Put who forgot the tickets. Put the photograph where somebody’s hair is horizontal. I will keep the lights on.