During the last month I really became obsessed with beautiful urls. So what is beautiful and what not? Take a look at the url for my weblog at the SAP Software Developer Network (SDN)

https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/weblogs?blog=/pub/u/32510

As you see it is not self explaining and hard to decode. So a more beautiful version would be this one:

https://www.sdn.sap.com/weblogs/author/thomas-ritter

Of course, this url will never be a permanent link because sometimes people want or have to change their lastname. But you should get the idea.

I admit that I used these ugly url parameters (http://url-from-hell.com?word1=I&word2=AM&word3=EVIL) before I discovered rails. But now there is no need to be evil anymore ;)

Btw the rails implementation which allows you to create these nice urls is really simple check out the official guide here: http://manuals.rubyonrails.com/read/chapter/65.