Profiles and user names in the URL (Read 723 times)

First off, I wanted to say that I'm a CR refugee and I really like the Training Log and profile pages here. I was noticing that the profile pages use a unique identifier in the URL. For example, the URL for my profile is http://www.runningahead.com/profiles/db9c2fe19ad745fcbd03e6f5b38e5ad5. It would be nice if the URLs were more readable, using the username instead of the unique ID, i.e. http://www.runningahead.com/profiles/Afty. That way you could look up people's profiles without having to find/click a link. The same goes for Training Logs.

As far as HTTP is concerned having usernames in URLs can get nasty once you start to have spaces or non-english characters in usernames. I don't think anyone wants to figure out how to URL encode their usernames. Plus, with the Browse User Logs page, it's not too difficult to find people you're looking for. Maybe having the option for username or GUID in the URL? hmmm, perhaps Eric will drop by and give some insight on this..

Oh, also, there is a browse logs, but not a browse profiles option for public profiles.

Yeah, but that is the user's problem. Of course, you could have the username map to the more verbose name so that the url is not dependent upon a user being stable. Er, I mean username being stable.