Question

I’m having a hard time even figuring out how to write a Google search to figure this out.

If you click on a story on Digg it puts it all in the URL like digg.com/news/science/why_the_world_is_tilted, instead of digg.com/reader.php?r=news&s=science&t=why_the_world_is_tilted

I’m pretty sure they don’t have several million subfolders, and I recall reading something 4 years ago that explained how it works, but I don’t remember enough to look it up again.

Answer 1

If your server is running Apache and mod_rewrite is installed you can create a file called .htaccess containing this:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
  RewriteEngine on
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]
</IfModule>

This will send the path to a request index.php in the var $_GET[‘q’].
It wont send the path to index.php if the path is to an existing file or directory.