Ever muddle through your standard procrastinations and find yourself still schlumping around when you notice with confused horror that the sun has already set again? It can happen. It can even happen when you have the kind of life/job/etc. where you have to go somewhere and interact with people, but if you do a lot of solo freelance work like me, it can be even worse. Well, here's a response. It’s not a solution, mind you — just a thing you can do if you find yourself in this situation.

1&1 shared hosting is now handling 404 errors (on my server, at least) by redirecting to the sedoparking dot com domain -- with no hint to visitors that the site even exists, or that they hit a bad link. Only they know if this is the new general policy (and they aren't saying) but it's a keen reminder of the importance of custom 404 pages. Here's a simple example for any domain that uses some JavaScript to provide much more helpful information than you'd see in most defaults.

I read an interesting article today, proposing a naming approach for database tables and fields. What was a little startling to me, though, is that it was clearly a carefully-considered approach, but I disagreed with almost every single conclusion he drew. I’ll review the main points and outline my approach along the way.