The Way It Has Always Been Done
I use a lot of web forms to format text for various things, like my menus (on LiveJournal) and podcast RSS stuff. These forms just take the input, format it, and spit it back out. Nothing is saved anywhere. I copy the information from the screen and put it in a file (in part, so I don't have to deal with security issues). Because nothing is saved, this means that I use these forms (especially for the podcast) at the end of the process. I type in all the RSS stuff while I'm uploading the podcast mp3. Today, while I was planning out what tasks still need to be done for the podcast database, I was still thinking that the information related to the next episode could only be input just before the podcast was posted. I have been thinking that way since I started this project. However, all this information is going into a database. If I don't know when the third song in the podcast starts playing, I can enter that information later. I had already planned to have (as I do already in a spreadsheet) a list of potential episodes with songs that I can use in those episodes. However, if I know that the next two episodes will be X and Y-themed, there is no reason why I can't put that information into the database as soon as I know it. This is kind of a shock for me. It is interesting when the limitations of one solution get carried over into a solution that really doesn't have the same limitations. There is a Russian saying: Ничего нет более постоянного, чем временное. "Nothing is more permanent than something temporary." Sasha had said this in response to me talking about other temporary fixes, but it seems that it kind of applies in this circumstance too.