ATechStudio: small-business systems

Summary

The practical side: sites for ATechStudio and a Roll The Dice Café rebuild, served by Caddy on the Pi. Their contact and service-request forms go to n8n webhooks that log to data tables and notify me. An email-triggered site-update flow only accepts mail from one sender, has a weekly quota for the client and logs every outcome. There's also an hourly Gmail triage and a vendor mail merge that turns a sheet into personalised PDF letters.

The problem

Enquiries get lost, websites go stale because updating them is a chore, and inboxes fill up.

Why I built it

These are the jobs most small businesses actually need. They aren't glamorous, but together they save a few hours every week.

The solution

Small, auditable workflows. Every outcome (success, failure, declined, over quota) is logged, and nothing is silently dropped.

What it does

• Inbox Auto-Sort's first run filed about 250 backlog messages into the right labels. It only touches unlabelled mail, so anything I've labelled by hand is never reprocessed.
• Email-to-website updates with a sender allow-list, a weekly quota and a full usage log.
• Vendor letters mail-merged from a Google Docs template, exported to PDF and emailed, with each row marked as sent.

Technologies, and what they're for

• CaddyStatic hosting
• n8n webhooksForm backends
• Gmail / Docs / SheetsNotifications, templates, logs
• GeminiSite imagery

AI involvement

• Gemini-generated site imagery in a consistent style

Automation

• Form intake
• Site updates by email
• Inbox triage
• Mail merge

Infrastructure

• Pi-hosted Caddy containers

Hard parts

• I chose rule-based email classification over AI on purpose: it's predictable, free and easy to audit.

Outcome

In daily use.