Quite a busy Sunday. A lot of development across the Niche Clever projects, particularly the privacy infrastructure and Personal Workbench, with some portfolio research and security work later in the day.
Opportunity scan
The morning's automated opportunity scan identified a Publishing Platform Manager role with the Royal Society of Chemistry.
It scored the position at 8.8/10 and produced a tailored CV, covering letter and evidence map, all saved to Google Drive.
It looked an interesting match, involving scholarly publishing platforms, metadata, vendor relationships and operational support. Quite a lot of overlap with my earlier publishing work, as well as some more recent systems development.
The application deadline was 9 November. No application had been submitted by the end of Sunday.
Niche Clever Privacy and analytics
Spent a substantial part of the day working on Niche Clever Privacy, the new WordPress plugin for recording website technologies, privacy notices and analytics arrangements.
Started with an investigation of the local website's existing Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager and Site Kit configuration.
There were some questions about potentially duplicated tag delivery and how interactions with Niche Clever Interactive and the Social Browser should be recorded.
Got the local plugin versions aligned, including NCI Core 1.0.3, Premium 1.0.0 and Social Browser 0.5.2.
Added a browser-event interface to distinguish things like selecting a question, submitting it and receiving a response, without transmitting the question text or personal identifiers.
At that stage the interface was local, with no events being sent to Google.
Then built the first standalone Niche Clever Privacy plugin demonstration.
Version 0.1.0 provides administrative screens for a technology inventory, notice revisions, event definitions, review records and example aggregate reporting.
Installed it on the local WordPress test site and verified activation, deactivation, access controls and the main integration boundaries.
The plugin was designed to remain independent of the existing NCI components, so that it could be disabled without breaking them.
Interactive Professional Portfolio
Also returned to the Interactive Professional Portfolio and the V11 research material.
Spent some time reviewing my professional history, the projects I've found most interesting and the people who have influenced the way I approach problems.
We looked at how my working methods have developed over the years, particularly the relationship between systems thinking, software development and the possibilities opened up by working with AI agents.
Also discussed the treatment of historical social-media material, particularly Twitter and Flipboard, and how to distinguish my own writing from material I've shared, selected or curated.
Clarified that the final approved selection from the Social Browser should form the basis of the next public Twitter corpus, rather than simply importing everything from the archive.
The conversation was consolidated into a V11 research-ingestion document. No new corpus release was authorised.
Notes from the Workbench
Made substantial progress on the Notes from the Workbench project.
Started by reviewing the existing Personal Workbench application, Harness, the WordPress ticker-diary plugin and Mea Culpa to establish which parts of the proposed workflow already existed.
Created the Notes from the Workbench context pack and a set of discovery, editorial-decision and handoff documents.
Ran an independent verification of the findings rather than repeating the investigation. That confirmed the architecture and identified a few discrepancies between the local repositories and their context-pack records.
Then moved into implementation.
Built the main diary pipeline inside Personal Workbench, including storage, Ollama draft generation, a review interface and the WordPress publishing client.
The automated test suite finished with 855 tests passing.
The full process still needed testing against the local WordPress installation, and the backup and recovery arrangements needed more work. Those became the main tasks for Monday.
More work on Niche Clever Privacy
Returned to the privacy plugin in the evening.
Extended the local demonstration to version 0.2.1, adding a sanitised evidence export, a privacy drafting pack, two unpublished WordPress notice pages and a small preferences banner.
The notice pages were left as drafts, and the banner stored its choice locally in the browser. It did not enforce consent or change the site's analytics behaviour.
Tested the local pages and recorded the build results and outstanding decisions.
Interactive Portfolio: Prompt security
Also spent a substantial evening session reviewing how Niche Clever Interactive responds to a visitor who has been repeatedly submitting hostile questions.
The visitor has been probing the system with questions about my personal circumstances, attempting to elicit unsupported claims and testing the boundaries of the instructions governing its responses.
In some respects, I've been getting free penetration testing. The questioning has exposed areas where the instructions and privacy boundaries could be strengthened, and that's useful information.
Even so, the activity has been persistent and is verging on abusive.
Reviewed the conversation records and developed a stronger set of instructions covering personal information, evidence standards, speculative claims, hostile questioning and attempts to manipulate the system's responses.
Initial responses to the revised instructions looked encouraging, although further review would be needed.
Also considered the wider implications for the website's privacy policy, terms and conditions, and application-level protections.
There was more to explore, particularly the distinction between legitimate adversarial testing and behaviour that becomes harassment. A subject for a later entry.
End of day
Quite a lot achieved.
By Sunday evening, Niche Clever Privacy had moved from investigation to a working local plugin demonstration, with draft notices and a preliminary banner.
Personal Workbench had the main diary publishing pipeline implemented, although it still needed full integration and acceptance testing.
The Interactive Portfolio had additional V11 research material, and I'd made progress on strengthening its responses to hostile questioning.
The next planned task was Workbench integration testing.
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