I didn’t see this mentioned anywhere in the Rails Guide or in my admittedly cursory Google searches, but apparently it’s possible to create named redirect routes in Rails 3. For example:

Myapplication::Application.routes.draw do
  match "/facebook" => redirect("http://www.facebook.com/pages/MarkZuckerbergFanClub/12345678"), :as => 'facebook'
  match "/twitter" => redirect("http://twitter.com/TweetyMcTweet"), :as => 'twitter'
end
view raw routes.rb This Gist brought to you by GitHub.

Then you can use those in your layouts like so:

<ul class="social-links">
  <li class="facebook"><%= link_to "Like us on Facebook", facebook_path %></li>
  <li class="twitter"><%= link_to "Follow us on Twitter", twitter_path %></li>
</ul>

view raw application.html.erb This Gist brought to you by GitHub.