That’s a “can do” deal, but ….
The computer scientist in me cringes. There are two issues here.
1) You either have to designate which “post” the report concerns, include all posts, or designate which posts will be included in the report, perhaps using the date range. If multiple posts are included, how would you distinguish them? Perhaps by including columns headed by that post name? If instead, you really just want to allow for a single post, how would you identify it? Would you use a filter with a pull-down so that you could select only one?
2) If someone were to use the list, say electronically to import into some company database, the format you suggest makes it easy for a person to see who has read it, but difficult for a program. For example, someone might want to automate this report and send email to “nag” those who haven’t read it. The problem is that the list is not “normalized”. It contained the readers and non-readers in the same column and not all of the rows show people (two rows are simply headers for the type of people that follow). In order to fix that, you have to use at least one more column. something more along the lines of:
who post name
person 1 read
person 2 read
person 3 read
person 4 read
person 5 read
person 6 unread
person 7 unread
Assuming you had only on post, you could easily sort by read/unread in the CSV file or even bring it into Excel (or other program) and use a filter to produce two separate lists.
The above format also afford others who might want to see a similar report, but with multiple posts instead of one. You could then have multiple columns headed by “post name 1”, “post name 2”, etc.
Rather than use “read” and “unread”, why not put in the date (leaving the “unread” blank)? I know that some people not only want to know IF a post was read and understood, but also WHEN the reader acknowledged it. For example, I know of one company that insists that a weekly update be read within a week.
Your thoughts?
