Practical and useful coding tricks that help web developers save time?
I'm a php web programmer.  I want to know if there are common web problems that web programmers face for which there are unorthodox and effective solutions.

As an example, I'm making a simple website of user generated profiles.  A user can store a whole bunch of information that range from first high school to when he first went to a baseball game.  Instead of making 50 columns in the database for form data I never intend to search/query against, I simply serialize the form data - serialize($_POST) - and save it  in the t_user.general_info text column.  This simplifies my database because I don't need atomicity on such mundane data.  At any time in the future, I can explode() the data to see it all again.  I think if I were back in school, teachers would dis-approve of this.  But hey, it's fast and practical!

I'm wondering if there are other simple tricks for other web development scenarios that will help me save time.
Practical and useful coding tricks that help web developers save time?
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I'm a php web programmer.  I want to know if there are common web problems that web programmers face for which there are unorthodox and effective solutions.

As an example, I'm making a simple website of user generated profiles.  A user can store a whole bunch of information that range from first high school to when he first went to a baseball game.  Instead of making 50 columns in the database for form data I never intend to search/query against, I simply serialize the form data - serialize($_POST) - and save it  in the t_user.general_info text column.  This simplifies my database because I don't need atomicity on such mundane data.  At any time in the future, I can explode() the data to see it all again.  I think if I were back in school, teachers would dis-approve of this.  But hey, it's fast and practical!

I'm wondering if there are other simple tricks for other web development scenarios that will help me save time.