For the past year or so I've been deluged with questions from friends and co-workers asking me when that darn website of mine will be done. It's done when it's done, alright! Designing a website is one thing, developing one in a new language is another challenge, and being pleased with the overall project itself, well, I'm a stickler detail, so every little thing gets under my skin. I won't even go into my normal speech about making it compatible with Internet Explorer, you may remember that from a previous blog.

Well, this weekend consists of one and only one thing...work!!! I have a dozen or so performance reviews to go over for members of my team, each of which takes about an hour or so to do a good job on. Needless to say, I couldn't spend my entire weekend just focusing on my job-related activities. Therefore I decided to implement a minor improvement to the functionality of the site, at least the blog section for now. What you ask? Friendly URLs of course.

For quite some time, I've been using the following dirty URL syntax for viewing blogs:

http://ruby.epartment54.com/blog/view/57

I know, not very friendly and worse than that, it's hard to tell what the heck the blog is actually about. Key in the theme music for 'friendly URLs'.

Although there wasn't much programming involved. I needed to re-factor some of the code in the blog controller, modify one model, modify the routes.rb, and update several views for the blog. Now, instead of the dirty URL mentioned above, the URL for this blog looks like this...

http://ruby.epartment54.com/blog/view/2006/10/7/friendly-urls-on-a-saturday

I'll be writing test code to ensure that this functionality acts the way I want it to as well as doesn't break anything else, but for now, back to going over performance reviews.