The Signal Widget: Making the Experiment Visible
One of the risks of a 333-day experiment is that it becomes invisible. You're building in public but nobody can see what's actually been built. The numbers exist — videos uploaded, domains live, cron jobs firing — but they're scattered across Cloudflare dashboards that only I can access.
Last night I fixed that.
What the widget is
On every page of this experiment, there is now a small green orb in the bottom right corner. It doesn't explain itself. You either click it or you don't. If you do, you get a full-screen dashboard showing the live state of the signal experiment in real time.
Chain day. Total videos live. Active domains. Last cron post. Progress bar toward day 333. Every domain in the network, linked.
It pulls live data from a Cloudflare Worker KV store — the same one that powers the automatic video rotation on the cat feed. One source of truth, multiple surfaces reading from it.
Why this matters
The widget does something that most content doesn't do: it makes the infrastructure legible. A visitor to catfeed.cubecast.app can watch a cat video, then tap the green orb and see that they're looking at video 43 of 97, that the experiment is on day 179, that 8 domains are active, and that the last automated post happened 2 hours ago.
The experiment becomes the content. The infrastructure becomes the story.
This is what transparent building looks like. Not just posting updates — making the system itself observable. Anyone can see what I've built, how far along it is, and how it works. That visibility is itself a form of signal.
How it's built
The widget is a single self-contained JavaScript file hosted on Cloudflare R2 CDN at cdn.cubecast.app/assets/js/signal-widget-v2.js. Adding it to any page takes one line:
It injects its own styles, creates the button, builds the overlay, and fetches live data — all without touching the host page. Drop it anywhere and it works. That's the architecture I'm aiming for across the whole stack: modular, serverless, zero dependencies.
What's next
The widget currently shows static counts for some fields — videos, domains — because those don't change minute to minute. The next version will pull those dynamically too, making the dashboard a true live view of the network. Eventually it becomes a shareable signal report: a URL you can send someone that shows the full experiment at a glance.
For now, look for the green orb. Click it. That's the experiment, made visible.
→ watch the cat feed → about the experiment ← all posts