While obvious to the well trained, we encore coders (at least, me, anyway) very much need this kind of guidance!
For example, I recently took on a project to rehabilitate the many broken links on an older blog and at first, I dug in with my old ad hoc approach of finding and fixing.
After I had updated three or four of those non-performing pieces of html, I suddenly realized I was using none of the best practices outlined in the tutorial above. It was time to stop and re-evaluate - did I just want to finish the project, or did I want to improve my coding work habits?
Fortunately for my career arc, I decided to choose the latter. I stepped away from the immediate work and focused on the best practice of documentation,
I built an equivalency table, populated it with all of the broken links from the link checker report and then found updated destinations for each broken link, listing the new destination in the appropriate place on my table.
With a robust tool in hand, I then went back to the project work and voila! A documented, repeatable and audit-able approach to link rehab.
