Greetings, esteemed monks!

In my organization it's common for there to be a whiteboard in the hall near a workgroup that lists each person's name and whether they are in or out that day. One other group developed a web page for the same thing, only each member is responsible for editing it to reflect exactly where they are at any given time (like "lunch" or "errand"). My boss wanted the same thing, only really just to report exceptional circumstances.

So anyway the gist of it is that there's an HTML page with a table in it, with a link to the edit script at the bottom of the page. The edit script displays a drop down list of workgroup members and a large text box for the note. Works fine, except that when I wrote it I decided I was going to use XML as the underlying data as a learning experience. Talk about a cannon to swat a fly. Anyway the order of the entries is important, and I thought I got the order tied, but then someone left our group and we hired a new guy. So when I edited the xml, the order got shifted and I can't get it back. So anyway, if you were going to start from scratch to write an application like this, how would you keep track of the underlying data? Having gained some experience since I first wrote the thing, I am thinking just a CSV with two columns would suffice.

I'll put code in a reply to this node so it doesn't take up lots of space if it shows up on a front page.

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I like computer programming because it's like Legos for the mind.