Something I've seen and always wanted to emulate are URLs like this:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1491939/can-e4x-have-an-array-passed-to-it

As you can tell just from looking at this URL - it's a question on StackOverflow.com about whether you can pass array to E4X. And you can tell all that simply by looking at the URL!

Not only is this good for the user (perhaps) but it's good for Google and SEO of a site in general.

But how do you do it? I'd always assumed (naively) that you'd have to:

1. Store the URL-safe version of the question in the database.
2. Ensure this URL-ready version of the title was unique.

Turns out neither of those are true. The only part of the URL the backend code cares about is the question ID (1491939).

How To Do It:

I'll cover IIS as that's what I've been using just recently. First open IIS manager app and find the URL Rewrite plugin for your website:

In there choose Add Rule and then "User-friendly URL":

In the next dialog you enter the URL of the ASPX page as the server expects it and then the Rule works out the user-friendly for it, as you can see below, using the Stackoverflow example:

You also get the option to have IIS rewrite out-going HTML to make sure all internal links point to this new friendly format. I left this un-ticked though and just made sure I stuck to the new convention when building my pages.

As you can see it uses Regular Expression to re-write the URLs. Notice it's sending the title part of the URL to the server as a parameter. It doesn't need to though and this parameter isn't referred to by the code.

That's how simple it is though. I can't believe it didn't dawn on me that it would be this straight-forward. Doh!

Here are some example of it in use with a new site I'm working on (for myself).

http://www.grouplets.co.uk/region/247356/the_peak_district/

http://www.grouplets.co.uk/property/163524/hurdlow_grange/

Is it just me that gets a warm fuzzy feeling inside from being able to do stuff like this. Must be a geek thing.

1. Use the innovation centers to provide learning environments for certified program members to learn  new software versions to keep up their certs.
2. Use the innovation centers to provide learning environments for certified program members to learn software package while they are trying to get certified.
3. Access to software that can be down loaded and used to learn with by members of the certified community.
4. A program to encourage test prep producers to produce materials.
5. A link to IBM Global service jobs so that certified people can apply for IBM GS jobs and GS can attract and approach Certified Individuals.
6. Discounts to Lotusphere for Certified individuals even if it's 10 dollars.
7. Change the CLI requirments to make it easier to obtain, add a years of certification to a path to become a CLI.
8. Add a user community boards to the Certification program to help guide the direction.