Best Practices

Maybe there are people out there who have a consistent level of efficiency throughout the entire workday. If you are one of those people I salute you. For my own part, I’m reasonably efficient for most of the day, but I seem to have a sweet spot of a few hours in the late afternoon when my productivity seems to get a little boost. I don’t mean to imply that I’m twice as efficient during those hours, but it is enough of an increase that I notice. So there you have it, the best time of day to work is in the late afternoon. End of post.

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My guess would be most web designers learn this lesson pretty early, but I’d like to add it to the Best Practices canon anyway. You design web sites all the time for all kinds of clients. As a result, you’ve built up a good deal of knowledge about what does and does not work in a web browser. Surely a customer will be only too happy to bow to your extensive wisdom in this arena and give you free reign to create the site that you know will best meet there needs, right? You’ll create the perfect site, hand it over to them, and everyone will be thrilled about the end result.

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Since it’s Valentine’s Day, I want to talk a little about love (as it relates to this blog, at least). I love being an independent web designer. I love being my own boss. On rare occasions I’ll find myself wondering if I would love going back to a traditional job. I think it’s worth considering from time to time. There are definite advantages to being a “wage slave”. Up to this point I’ve always sided with freelance work after I way the pros and cons. Truth be told, I suspect I always will, but always is a profound word. I think it’s worth checking in every once in a while, so here’s the rationale that (so far) always leads me back to loving freelance web design.

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In part 1 of this series I talked about turning your data audit trail into an interface feature. The primary purpose of an audit trail, though, is to allow you to see a clear picture of every change that has occurred with your data. While the history table solution that I offer is extremely easy to implement, it has the drawback of being contained inside your database. That means your data history is only as secure as your database.

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The post on this blog that gets the most search engine traffic is Leaving an Audit Trail In Your Database. I explain several techniques that allow you to store information in the database about how and when records are being changed, with the most comprehensive and effective solution being to create history tables. The obvious benefit is when data is inadvertently changed or deleted, you can track down what happened as well as restore the correct information. That’s not the only good use for an audit trail, though. Providing read only access of the audit information to users, gives accurate and up-to-date history reports of the data.

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