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2025
Platform
Spread the Word
Spread the Word is a shared fridge door made from digital letter magnets. Move a letter, create another room, or send someone the exact part of the canvas you are looking at. Every change sticks. The default room is literally what lives on the smart fridge in our kitchen.
01
INTRO
Section Open
Nearly twenty years ago, this started as a homework assignment at Devine in Kortrijk and a very simple idea: put fridge magnets on a screen and let people move them around. The application has now lived through Flash, a Node.js rebuild, and an AI-assisted production rewrite. The idea never needed to become more complicated.
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A homework assignment that refused to die
02
BODY
I first built Spread the Word almost twenty years ago in Flash and AS3. The idea came from a homework assignment while I was studying Devine at Howest in Kortrijk. It felt almost too simple: put fridge magnets on a screen and let people move them around. Building it was easy. Making it look and feel that easy took about two weeks. That is where I learned that a good developer can solve an easy problem with a complicated solution, while a great developer can make a complicated problem feel easy. Good code is what makes that possible.
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Three lives of the same idea
03
BODY
When Flash died, I rebuilt the project in Node.js with the JavaScript stack I used at the time. Most of it worked. Some of it never felt quite right. In November 2025 I rebuilt it again with Claude Code. What took two weeks two decades earlier went from first prompt to production in roughly two hours. AI did not change the idea. It changed the amount of friction between having the idea and shipping it.
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The actual fridge door
04
BODY
The main URL redirects to a room called the-fridge-door because that is what the original idea always was: the loose magnetic letters people stick to a fridge. I now own a smart fridge, and this is the page we actually look at on it every day. Move a letter in the public room and you can literally change what is shown on our fridge.
FIG. 01
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Rooms that remember
05
BODY
Every room has its own URL, canvas, and persisted set of magnets. A new room begins with ten copies of every letter, scattered across a 5000 by 5000 pixel surface. The A to Z picker places new letters near the current view and searches for a free spot before falling back to a random visible position. Positions and stacking order live in MongoDB, so closing the browser does not reset the work.
FIG. 02
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Move together, look independently
06
BODY
Letter changes are shared live through Socket IO. If someone moves or adds a magnet, everyone in that room sees it. The room card shows connection state and how many people are online. The viewport stays personal, so each person can pan and zoom without pulling everyone else around the canvas. The app remembers that view locally and frames the densest cluster for first-time visitors. It works with mouse dragging, wheel zoom, touch dragging, and pinch zoom from 30% to 180%.
FIG. 03
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Share the exact view
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Sharing a room can include the exact canvas center and zoom level. Open the link and you land on the same cluster of letters instead of somewhere random on the 5000 pixel canvas. The same link can hide the interface completely. That turns the room into a clean presentation or permanent display, which is exactly how the-fridge-door is used at home.
FIG. 04
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A view across the rooms
08
BODY
A separate statistics screen shows how many rooms exist, how many letters they contain, current active viewers, and which rooms are most populated. The room table can be sorted by name, letter count, or active users and links straight into any shared canvas.
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Small on purpose
09
BODY
The current version uses TypeScript, Express, Socket IO, MongoDB, and plain browser DOM code. It only renders magnets near the current viewport, reuses elements while panning, animates remote movement, and keeps shared letter data separate from each person's local view. The stack is not the point. The point is that all of those moving pieces disappear behind something that still feels like putting magnets on a fridge.
Additional Frames
