Last week I attended a 5-day training course, and on the last day (Friday) I came back to the office since training ended at about 12PM.  This course of action was frowned upon by some, who insisted that when you attend “this sort of thing” the expectation is that you go home if it finishes early.

That didn’t sit well with me, so like I said, I found myself at work.  I felt strangely refreshed and renewed.  Not sure why, but it was almost like coming back from vacation.  Except better – for me at least, since being away on vacation often carries stressors of its own.

Anyhoo, today I came in and went about my usual routine – which includes connecting to home so that I can stream music from the audio system.  At some point I needed to move some entries around in a playlist, and for whatever reason it hit me that there was some trivial code that I could implement to make that process (moving entries around) nicer.

You may recall that I spent a whole bunch of time in the past coding my own dynamic-reordering solution, which lets me reorder records in a table without having to refresh the whole page.  The concept isn’t novel, but in my case I was never comfortable with using DHTML to simply swap rows around; I wanted to the backend to feed updated info to the frontend, since there’s more happening than just swapping visual elements.  So my solution was to clear the table and have it refresh itself from the backend.

I was never 100% comfortable with this, for a number of reasons, but it dawned on my today that I didn’t need to refresh the whole table; rather, I only needed to refresh those rows that would be affected by the reorder.

So that’s what I did.  And it’s quite nice, if I may say so myself.

This is the sort of thing I hope to bring to web-based projects at work – finding little, novel evolutions to the code that bring noticeable improvements to the UI.

Anyhow, that’s all.