Or you can use the Canonical URL Tag and forget about these annoying redirects

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/...

I disagree. Using <link rel="canonical"> will fix the indexing part,
telling search engines to index /items/1-foo and nothing else, but if
someone e.g. posts a URL with a fake slug on a forum, someone
following that link will be none the wiser.

Neat. We've been doing something similar. The "and return" bit is entirely superfluous, btw

Cool. And true, "and return" isn't necessary in this particular case. I think I left it in since it will be necessary if the action goes on to render something explicitly, but I suppose that's uncommon for a show action.

personally I enjoy putting returns in everywhere because I think it makes it more obvious what's going on when you're reading back code.

Apparently :overwrite_params was deprecated in 2.3.6 (https://rails.lighthouseapp.... Note the "return" is necessary otherwise you get a double render error when extra stuff is in the URL.

I've posted my code here: http://patrickberkeley.gith....