title: Friendly url scheme?
body: <p>One of the many things that's been lacking from my <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/61553/track-your-reputation">scraper service</a> that I set up last week are pretty URLs. Right now the user parameter is being passed into the script with <em>?u=</em>, which is a symptom of a lazy hack (which the script admittedly is). However, I've been thinking about redoing it and I'd like to get some feedback on the options available. Right now there are two pages, update and chart, that provide information to the user. Here are the two possibilities that I came up with. "1234" is the user ID number. For technical reasons the user name unfortunately cannot be used:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>http://&lt; tld >/update/1234</li>
  <li>http://&lt; tld >/chart/1234</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>or</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>http://&lt; tld >/1234/update</li>
  <li>http://&lt; tld >/1234/chart</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Option #1, conceptually, is calling update with the user ID. Option #2 is providing a verb to operate on a user ID.</p>
  
  <p>From a consistency standpoint, which makes more sense?</p>
  
  <hr>
  
  <p>Another option mentioned is</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>http://&lt; tld >/user/1234/update</li>
  <li>http://&lt; tld >/user/1234/chart</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>This provides room for pages not relating to a specific user. i.e.</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>http://&lt; tld >/stats</li>
  </ul>