Monday 9 November 2026
I’d deliberately set myself a fairly modest list of things to do on Monday. Partly because I wanted to finish the day having actually completed something, and partly because there are some more substantial pieces of work I wanted to get into on Tuesday.
The main job was refreshing the Niche Clever website. There were a number of things I’d noticed about the pages, the layout and some of the writing that I wanted to tidy up. Nothing particularly dramatic, but enough to justify spending some time on it.
Of course, website development is a slightly never-ending business. There’s always another improvement to make, another detail to adjust. At some point you have to decide you’ve done enough, at least for the time being.
A website refresh
I started by copying the live website back to my local development installation, which gave me an up-to-date starting point for the changes.
I also took the opportunity to have the plugin estate audited. That turned up a few things worth attending to, including some outstanding updates and older plugins that could probably be cleared out.
Much of the work was editorial and presentational. I wanted the various pages to do a better job of explaining what Niche Clever is doing, and to improve some of the smaller details of the layout. I’ve been building out the website fairly rapidly over the last couple of weeks, and inevitably there are things that look rather different when you come back to them a few days later.
By the end of the day I’d brought the live website up to date with the changes I’d made locally, so the two were aligned again.
Getting Core ready for its next step
I also spent some time on Niche Clever Interactive Core, installing and testing version 1.0.7 on the local website, alongside an update to the Ticker Diary plugin.
One of the things I wanted to check was how Core’s answers looked within the actual website. I’d made some adjustments to the typography and heading sizes, and wanted to see how they behaved alongside the site’s own styling.
The connection test passed and Core answered a real question, which was encouraging.
More importantly, having Core working properly within the website means I can now get on with the final set of tests for its submission to WordPress.org. That’s been a rather longer process than I’d anticipated, and I’m keen to get it finished.
It also puts me in a position to begin building the payment infrastructure for Niche Clever Interactive Premium. I’ve already done a substantial amount of planning around subscriptions and licensing, so there’s a reasonably clear route into that work.
Keeping the project histories current
I also returned to some work on the development histories of my various projects.
I’ve accumulated an enormous amount of material over the last year, and keeping track of it all has become quite a substantial undertaking in its own right. I’m particularly interested in preserving not just what I’ve built, but the decisions and conversations that shaped it.
I’ve been using a method that takes development chronologies and turns them into detailed, readable accounts of individual projects. I’ve used something similar before, but it needed adapting for the newer material.
Monday’s work involved reviewing a refresh covering 22 project histories, with 88 proposed additions. There were some gaps in the material, including things I knew I’d been working on recently, so I spent some time investigating what had been missed and how to improve the process.
I find these histories increasingly useful. For one thing, they save me having to remember quite so much. More importantly, they’re useful to the AI agents I’m working with. Having a reasonably coherent account of a project’s development makes it much easier to pick up work again, particularly when the last session might have involved a different agent or a different set of tools.
There’s also a more immediate application. The histories will contribute to version 11 of my Interactive Professional Portfolio, which I’m hoping will give a much more complete and current account of the work I’ve been doing.
There’s still a fair amount to process, but the material is coming together.
A good place to finish
So Monday turned out to be rather more productive than I’d originally planned.
The website refresh was completed, the live and local versions were brought into line, Core had been tested on the website, and I’d made some useful progress on the development histories.
I’d deliberately set the bar fairly low, and ended up comfortably clearing it.
Which was rather the point. I wanted to finish Monday with a few things properly dealt with, rather than another long list of half-finished jobs. Tuesday could then be devoted to something a bit more substantial.
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