Wednesday 4 November 2026
I had a pretty nasty accident in September and broke my pelvis, which meant spending the next twelve days in hospital. It was a fairly grim experience, although, unable to do much else, I ended up spending a lot of time working on the corpus for the Interactive Professional Portfolio. At least something useful came out of it.
Recovery has been slow but steady. I can walk without crutches now, although I’m still rather slow, and getting out and about is something of an undertaking. I’ve been doing a bit more of it recently, but Wednesday’s trip to Lidl was disproportionately exciting, largely because I hadn’t been able to get to a supermarket for some time.
My brother was visiting the area from Manchester and had offered to give me a lift. It was the first time we’d seen each other in about eighteen months, so it was lovely to see him. He works for Tearfund, the development charity, and it was good to catch up over a late breakfast after the shopping.
I’d already spent a couple of hours working, getting my head around what I needed to do. By the time I got back to my machine, I had two projects occupying most of my attention: a fairly substantial rethink of my Personal Workbench application and further development of the privacy controls for Niche Clever.
Rethinking the Personal Workbench
Personal Workbench is a Windows desktop application I’ve been developing to help co-ordinate my various projects, and it kind of grew fairly organically. What began as a collection of useful functions gradually accumulated more responsibilities, more integrations and more ways of doing things, which isn’t a bad way to work because you discover what you need by using it, but as often happens, eventually you reach a point where the shape of the thing becomes clearer, and you can see how you might have designed it differently if you’d known at the beginning what you know now.
That’s more or less where I’ve arrived.
The current exercise is partly an archaeological one. I’ve been mapping what the application does, how its components interact, which other systems it talks to, and what needs to survive into a new version.
The proposed replacement will have two complementary interfaces: a compact desktop rail for quick access to everyday functions, and a fuller workspace for more involved work. They’ll share the same underlying information, rather than becoming separate applications.
There has also been some detailed investigation of the application’s data storage and recovery arrangements, alongside experiments with SQLite using isolated test data. The intention is to build the replacement separately while keeping the existing application available.
It’s still exploratory work, but it’s coming along rather well. I’m beginning to get a clearer picture of what the Workbench ought to be.
Privacy controls and WordPress
The other main area of work was Niche Clever itself, particularly the privacy and consent functionality I’ve been developing for the website.
This involves more than displaying a cookie banner. The website has several components that handle different kinds of information, including analytics and Niche Clever Interactive, the question-and-answer system I’ve been building around my professional portfolio and other material.
The interesting technical problem is getting those components to work together coherently, so that a visitor’s choices can be reflected across the relevant systems.
I’ve been testing a local implementation that presents privacy choices, remembers preferences and provides a way to change them later. The work has involved checking the interactions between the plugins, reviewing how information flows through the site and developing the accompanying visitor-facing documentation.
It’s one of those areas where the visible interface is relatively simple, but there’s quite a lot happening underneath.
There’s more work to do before the whole arrangement is ready for the live website, but the local development has been useful in clarifying how the pieces should fit together.
And another journal entry
I also finished editing and published the previous Notes from the Workbench entry, A Better Activity Stream and Another Plugin Milestone.
I’m enjoying developing this journal, although it’s turning out to be an editorial project in its own right. The idea is to make a record of the work as it happens, without turning every day into a progress report or pretending that software development consists entirely of exciting breakthroughs.
Sometimes it’s a substantial architectural rethink. Sometimes it’s testing WordPress plugins. And occasionally, after spending rather too much time at home, it’s the unexpected pleasure of going to Lidl.
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