Thank you for any help you can give.

A:

Please Please Please do not do this.
Make every date a new row.
Make a date column.
So your table would look something like this:
  ID   |    Date      | Attendance |  
   1   |  2011-11-01  |      5     |
   2   |  2011-11-02  |      12    |
   3   |  2011-11-03  |      3     |

Then you can have a table of members.
Then you can have a join table of member to meeting. -- 
    Then when you have this you do not even need an Attendance column in the Meeting table because you can just count how many members are at each meeting with a simple query:
SELECT m.id, m.date, count(*) as `attendance`
FROM meeting m
LEFT JOIN meeting_to_member mm ON mm.meetingid = m.id
LEFT JOIN member mem ON mem.id = mm.memberid 
GROUP BY m.id;

A:

I'd suggest you set up something like this:
id    |  MeetingDate |    MemberName    |    Present
 1    |  2011-11-01  |    John Doe      |       1
 2    |  2011-11-01  |    John Smith    |       0
 3    |  2011-11-01  |    John Jackson  |       1
 4    |  2011-11-02  |    John Doe      |       0
 5    |  2011-11-02  |    John Smith    |       1
 6    |  2011-11-02  |    John Jackson  |       1
 7    |  2011-11-03  |    John Doe      |       1
 8    |  2011-11-03  |    John Smith    |       1
 9    |  2011-11-03  |    John Jackson  |       1

So you'd have a row for each member for each meeting whether they attended or not. My guess is you're not going to have millions and millions of rows with this system, so don't worry about performance.
You can get the total attendance for a member with something like:
SELECT SUM(Present) as total FROM attendance WHERE MemberName = 'John Doe';
// returns -> 2

You can get the total attendance for a meeting with something like:
SELECT SUM(Present) as total FROM attendance WHERE MeetingDate = 2011-11-01;
// returns -> 2

You can get all of the members that missed a specific meeting with something like:
SELECT MemberName FROM attendance WHERE Present = 0 AND MeetingDate = 2011-11-01;
// returns -> John Smith



Q:

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