One thing to keep in mind is you may not want users to be able to extrapolate the number of users or widgets in your system by looking at the sequential IDs. Depending on your business, that may be potentially protected information.

Do users really care about this?

Eric: permalink_fu won’t reset your permalink (by default) for that very reason. However, there’s another couple reasons why your idea is preferred (IMO). 1) You can fetch by ID now by calling #to_i on the parameter. Take advantage of the default pkey index. 2) Since the permalink doesn’t matter, we don’t care about unique permalinks anymore. use `has_permalink :foo, :unique => false`. It won’t create unique permalinks like ‘foo’, ‘foo-1′, ‘foo-2′ anymore.

/article/5-geography/13-european-capitals

Is a much better URL because you can do the find with the ID but still have something nice to look at in the URL. Since you are finding by the ID the name can change as it is just for the user. There are a few plugins that will do this automatically for you.