Thursday 5 November 2026
I started Thursday with the intention of getting the latest changes to the Niche Clever website onto the live site by the end of the day. I’d been working on the privacy controls, the footer and various other bits and pieces for a while, and I wanted to get them all into place.
I more or less managed it, although it took a few further tweaks after midnight before I was satisfied with where things had got to.
One of the things about developing a website is that there’s always something else you can do. You fix one thing, notice something else that could be improved, and before long you’re making changes to a part of the site you hadn’t originally intended to touch. I don’t particularly mind this, and quite a lot of useful development happens that way, but it does mean that finishing something is a rather elastic concept.
Getting the website ready
Most of the website work concerned the privacy controls I’ve been developing, along with changes to the site’s footer and navigation.
The privacy system involves several WordPress plugins that need to work together. The visible part is a fairly straightforward panel that allows visitors to make choices about analytics and the recording of their interactions with the site. Getting those choices to work consistently across the different components has been a more substantial exercise.
There was also quite a bit of work on the presentation. The privacy panel became more compact, the footer acquired a better arrangement of links, and I made further changes to the development activity and social archive sections.
Some of the less interesting work involved sorting out old website addresses and redirects left over from earlier versions of Niche Clever. The site has been through several iterations and hosting arrangements, and it’s surprising how much historical material can accumulate in the underlying database.
By the evening, the local version was looking pretty good, and the updated site was moved across to the live website. The new privacy controls and footer were working, and the main changes were in place.
There are still things I want to improve. There probably always will be.
More work on the Personal Workbench
Alongside all this, development continued on the Personal Workbench, the Windows application I’ve been rethinking over the last couple of days.
The replacement is being developed separately from the existing application, which means I can experiment without interfering with the tools I’m already using.
A good deal of Thursday’s work concerned data storage and recovery. I’ve been experimenting with SQLite, testing how projects and their associated information can be stored, how changes are handled, and how backups might work when both database records and ordinary files are involved.
There was progress with the interface as well. The experimental application has a compact desktop rail and a larger workspace, and I’ve been testing how the rail might integrate with Windows itself rather than simply sitting on top of everything else.
It’s still early work, but the various experiments are beginning to give the replacement a more definite shape.
Looking for work
The daily Niche Clever opportunity scan ran in the morning, looking for employment and consultancy opportunities that might be a good fit for the work I do.
There weren’t any particularly compelling new discoveries, but it did bring forward some existing possibilities, including a Publishing Platform Manager role with the Royal Society of Chemistry and a Systems Manager position involving IT, data and AI.
The Royal Society of Chemistry role is particularly interesting, given my background in publishing and software development. There’s already some application material prepared, although it still needs reviewing before anything is submitted.
This is another process I’ve been trying to make more systematic. Finding suitable work is one thing; identifying opportunities early enough, understanding the requirements and preparing a credible application is another.
What comes next
I’ve got some client work to attend to, quite a bit of which involves infrastructure development of one kind or another, but there are also a couple of things I want to get back to on my own projects.
The body of research for version 11 of the Interactive Professional Portfolio is almost in place, and I’m looking forward to getting back into that. There’s quite a lot of interesting work to be done there, particularly around how the system uses and presents the material I’ve been assembling.
More immediately, I still need to get the Niche Clever Interactive plugin submitted to WordPress.org. That’s something I want to concentrate on tomorrow, and it would be good to get it out of the way.
There’s a certain amount of overlap between all these activities, of course. Client infrastructure work, the Workbench, the website and the Interactive Professional Portfolio all involve different aspects of designing systems that need to work reliably and make sense to the people using them.
For now, though, it was satisfying to get the website changes into place. Even if I did end up working on them rather later than I’d intended.
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