Friday, July 30, 2010

Useful* Website Features

There's a 'last-updated' field on the data entry side of our e-book listings on the library website (that is, the part where I put in title and author info and the URL, not the part the eager would-be reader sees when looking for that perfect textbook about woody plant stems).

It fills in automatically with the current date, so I never really think about it, and the date that e-book information was most recently updated is not something that comes up all that often. But the other day I was thinking that sure, it could be handy if you just wanted to see, without checking the various Excel sheets and so forth, whether a title was part of this year's purchased package, or last year's.

Obviously, then, if a record was last updated sometime last year, we couldn't have just bought that title this year. Perfect!

Then I noticed that the field automatically resets to the current date as soon as you open the record in the edit view, even if you don't change anything. (And remember, you can't see this information in the non-editing view.)

So you can't actually see when it was last updated, even though the field is called "last updated," because the value instantly changes to (assuming I am looking at it today) July 30, 2010. And I know I didn't add every single book to the website today, but if I wanted to look at them all, that's what they'd say.

So when you get right down to it, all that field actually does is tell me what day it is. I'm not saying this couldn't be useful in certain situations where I didn't have any other means of finding that out. If, for example, I were not on a computer with both an internal calendar and an internet connection, and had lost both my paper calendar and my cell phone, and there was no one around to ask.

So remember, when designing websites, that a fun thing to include is information that would only be useful to a person who had no means of accessing a website.

I'm sure there's some webmaster back end way to just get a list of data in all the fields for all the titles, and thus to see when a record actually was last updated (or at least, last opened, since as I said the date changes even if you don't do anything to the record), but I really don't care enough to bother the web librarian about it.

I just think it's kind of funny to capture data that no one can see because it changes when you try to look at it. There's a philosophical point in there, I bet.


*Or, as it may happen, not very useful.

No comments: