With our rate of development, it’s easy to get caught up in efficiencies and speed past the question: what’s the best way to do this? In this case, rewriting URLs is the best way, but passing the query string was the quickest.

I’ve been trying to pay more attention to this since we got called out a few years ago for another quick practice: bad HTML code. Two versions back, we launched our own site in non-standards-compliant form. Didn’t even think about it, just coded it quick and launched. The next day when the site caught some attention, a commenter pointed out our (my) nested tables.

We had the site re-coded that day, but it still bugs me that someone else had to catch us (me) speeding before I caught it myself.

More recently, we’ve been called out on a few Truemors hacks. Most of these were rants on the process vs the mechanism, but there have been a few that I half expect to be followed by a consulting bill.

I’m finding criticism to be a hell of a resource.

We didn’t actually get called out on URL rewrites, but I’m sure it was only a matter of time. We’ve since rolled it into just about everything we do, and like cutting over to good code (the kind that validates) or optimizing open-source apps, we’re finding that it’s exceptionally easy to do.

I’ll follow this with a post showing exactly how easy it is to rewrite URLs. If I can save just one person the emotional distress I suffered by being made fun of by a mean high school kid, it’s worth it.