[Myexperiment-discuss] Re: URLs and Empty Workflows

[Andrea Wiggins]

+1 for human-readable URLs, if it's not too much work. I know I've thrown lots of stuff at the development team over the last week, but more memorable URLs are easier to relay to others in conversation or at conferences, on the rare occasion that one is offline. I made use of having set useful URL aliases just the other week to provide a URL off the top of my head to an interested colleague at a conference, which would not have been possible with the system-assigned URL.

Of course, I do know the URL for my myExperiment page off the top of my head, but that's because I've referred people to myExperiment regularly enough to have memorized it from the string that my browser conveniently remembers for me.

Something like the way Drupal handles URL aliasing might work. At the system level, the URL assigned by Rails would be the same, but the "clean URLs" functionality from mod_rewrite allows the CMS to rewrite automatically or for the user to override it. Whether clean URLs are assigned by the implementation itself or can be set by the content contributor is determined by system-level role permissions.

You'd have to check the licensing specifics, but Drupal is open source and maybe you could reuse some code...

Andrea

On Jun 15, 2009, at 6:43 PM, address@hidden wrote:

Hi Paul,

I love your idea, and this would certainly be a more useful way of 
structuring the URLs... IF we could guarantee that the names of 
workflows and the display names of users don't change over time. I 
suppose we could ask users to provide a perma-name for themselves and 
their workflows to achieve this though.

In the BioCatalogue, we have URLs like:

<http://beta.biocatalogue.org/services/1928-ebisearchservice_291308>

... which are slightly more informative and these will never change.