Soo … for the longest time I was wondering how a lot of websites are able to show pages without having tons of arguments at the end of the filename, or for that matter the presence of any file at all. The easiest example would be a before and after of our site now.

Directly linking to a comic would look like http://thespiffylife.com/comics/comics.php?id=110 which takes you right to a specific comic. I can add #comic / #comments / #comment_1 to the end of that to take you right to a specific part of that page.

You can tell apache to rewrite urls based on certain rules, which makes it so that when you go to http://thespiffylife.com/110/ I can set it up to act like you’re accessing the longer version –> http://thespiffylife.com/comics/comics.php?id=110.
If you are searching for comics by a specific author it gets even longer: http://thespiffylife.com/comics/comics.php?id=110&author=Guy becomes http://thespiffylife.com/Guy/110/ (which looks a lot nicer to me)

I’ve changed all the links (that I’ve found so far lol) to appear “prettier”, but if you still use the older, “uglier” version it’ll still work just fine .

For instance one of the sites I was referencing this from shows it’s URLs like so: http://www.roscripts.com/Pretty_URLs_-_a_guide_to_URL_rewriting-168.html The only part of that link after the .com that is actually used is the number. He’s got it setup to find the number after the hyphen and access the post with that ID from the database. (it’s not even an html file that it’s accessing). Sorry if this is random, but I’ve always been curious how people were doing that … and now I know!

Because knowledge is power! … *cough*

-josh