I Shipped a Live Stage and Deleted It the Next Morning
Three iframes rotating under the hero: Meshlight, the ISS tracker, the weather radar. It was the heaviest thing on the page and it looked like it had wandered in from another site.
On the 20th I added a Live Stage to the homepage. It sat between the hero and everything else: a carousel of three panels, Meshlight, the ISS tracker, and the weather radar, each a real iframe of the real page, with a poster image shown until the frame loaded. Auto-rotating, pausable, with a pill row of the live homelab hits from Pulse next to it.
On the 21st I removed it. The commit says why in one line: it looked out of place and it cost load time. Both were true the moment I looked at it on a phone.
The load cost is the obvious part. The first panel's iframe was loading="eager", so the homepage was fetching a second full Next.js page, Meshlight's bundle, plus its own fonts and scripts, before the visitor had scrolled anywhere. The ISS panel polls. The radar panel pulls RainViewer tiles. A portfolio homepage that was carrying one starfield and some cards was suddenly running three apps. On a cold load the stage was the single heaviest thing on the page and it was below the fold for most people anyway.
The design cost is the one that actually made the decision. The panels were live, which meant they did not match. Meshlight is cyan on black. The radar is a map. The ISS page has its own hero. Rotating between them every few seconds under a typewriter headline made the top of the page feel like a kiosk in a mall. The hero CTA pointed at the stage. It now points at #projects, which is where the screenshots are, and screenshots do not fetch anything.
What stayed is the StatusConsole: a small pane with a Pulse tab and a Meshlight tab, the roster of boxes Pulse publishes, and a live ok/ms pill per service from the Fabric hits endpoint. It does not probe the LAN, Pulse does. It is one fetch, it is text, and it says something a screenshot cannot: these things are up right now.
The lesson is not that iframes are bad. The Tesla hub and the guest arcade cabinets are iframes and they belong there, because the frame is the product. On the homepage the frame was decoration pretending to be content. If a component is the heaviest thing on the page, it has to also be the most important thing on the page, and this one was neither.