Your dashboard, and why it no longer looks like ours

A dashboard is a confession about whoever built it. The order of the blocks states what they consider important, and that judgement is imposed on everyone else.

Ours said: here is the composite index, then prices, then signals, then news. That was our order. A reader who came for oil and a reader who came for crypto got the same page, in the same sequence, with the same irrelevant blocks in the middle.

We spent a week undoing that.

What changed

The page became a board. Every block is a tile you can grab, move, widen, shrink or hide. You enter that mode through an "Organise" button, you tidy up, you leave. Your layout follows you from one device to another if you have an account.

We added views: named subsets of the same dashboard. A "market" view does not show the same tiles as a "monitoring" view. These are not different data — they are the same data, sorted by what you came to do.

And above all, you can now build your own charts. Take an empty tile, pick up to five series among those we are allowed to plot, a time window, and a reading mode — absolute values, percentages, or everything rebased to a common starting point so you can compare things that share no unit.

The number we actually cared about

Mostly we wanted the page to stop being long. A page you scroll through for ten seconds before reaching anything is not dense, it is badly arranged.

Before touching the code, we wrote down the threshold we wanted to hit, and recorded it. Then we measured the real height of the page, at two screen widths.

Screen width	Before	After	Change
1440 px (desktop)	5,906 px	4,788 px	−19 %
375 px (phone)	11,311 px	8,470 px	−25 %

These are height measurements, not estimates: there is no sample and no confidence interval to attach to them. You open the page, you measure, you get that number.

The gain did not come from removing content. It came from deleting a mechanism that stretched some tiles to fill the gap left by their neighbours. One tile stood 1,460 pixels tall for 720 pixels of actual content — and we had increased the number of items in its list to occupy that emptiness, instead of removing the emptiness.

The confession: we broke the charts

Here is the part a release note would quietly skip.

In making tiles resizable, we changed how a chart learns the height available to it. Instead of a number, we handed it a display instruction — the equivalent of "take all the room there is". The layout engine accepted it without complaint. The curve maths, on the other hand, was expecting a number.

The result: every curve in every chart tile went flat. Not blank — flat, a straight line at the top of the frame with a large empty space underneath. The chart was there, drawn, and showed nothing.

It took us four attempts to fix, because three smaller defects were hiding behind that one and taking turns producing the same symptom. One of them deserved to be found: our own verification tool was reporting that all was well. It measured the size of the chart's frame, which was correct, and never the amplitude of the curve inside it, which was zero. A check that measures what it knows how to measure, then draws a conclusion about what it never looked at.

It took a user saying it twice, then sending a screenshot.

We are writing this down because a product that only recounts its successes teaches you one thing: that it has a communications department. The tool now checks the shape of the curve, not the size of its frame.

What is coming

In this order, and with no dates — we do not announce any, because a deadline met out of reflex makes for bad decisions.

Composing what is inside a tile. Today you arrange the blocks, but you do not choose their contents: the featured-assets tile carries a list we wrote. It will become a container — you will add an asset, remove another, move one from one tile to the next.

A library of layouts. Ready-made arrangements that we will have designed and maintained, plus your own, saved under a name. With one rule: a layout naming a series we are no longer allowed to publish must degrade gracefully, never break.

Taking your settings with you. An export of your configuration to a file, and an import that restores it. Exporting will stay free — it is a read, and your settings belong to you. With one principle we will not bend: a damaged or tampered file will be refused, never silently repaired.

A detachable tool palette on large screens, if use shows it is missing. We deliberately started with a fixed bar, which delivers most of the benefit for a fraction of the work. If it proves sufficient, the floating version will never be written — and that is a good outcome.

What this does not change

You arrange the page. You do not change what it measures.

None of these features touch the engine, the thresholds, or whatever decides that a signal is published or withheld. Hiding a tile does not remove what it displayed from the published measurements; a chart you compose only plots series we are allowed to serve, and the server decides that, not your browser.

Arranging your page and changing what it says are two different things. We intend to keep them that way.