blogs and 'virtual directories'

[Titus Barik]

Hi,

Throughout the past few years, I've been working on a personal blog
that I've written using PHP. I recently noticed that a lot of blogs
support the following URL syntax:

/archives/2004/04/03/
/archives/2004/03/
/archives/2004/

and so on and so forth. The thing is, they obviously don't have an
actual HTML or PHP page in that directory; I doubt even that those
directories actually exist. My guess is that they are doing some sort of
URL re-writing using .htaccess in combination with perhaps a single PHP
page that takes in parameters as a GET query. It's just a guess, of
course.

The thing is: I really have no idea how they are doing this.

So, how would I implement something like this on my site using Apache
and PHP? What is the technical term for this style of 'URL re-writing'
even called? I don't mind doing a little research on my own, but I can't
seem to nail down exactly what keywords I need to search for in the
first place!

Any pointers or examples would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,

--
titus barik (ti***@barik.net) | www.barik.net | aim: tbarik
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[Andy Hassall]

On Sun, 9 May 2004 02:33:34 +0000 (UTC), Titus Barik <ti***@barik.net> wrote:

Throughout the past few years, I've been working on a personal blog
that I've written using PHP. I recently noticed that a lot of blogs
support the following URL syntax:

/archives/2004/04/03/
/archives/2004/03/
/archives/2004/

and so on and so forth. The thing is, they obviously don't have an
actual HTML or PHP page in that directory; I doubt even that those
directories actually exist. My guess is that they are doing some sort of
URL re-writing using .htaccess in combination with perhaps a single PHP
page that takes in parameters as a GET query. It's just a guess, of
course.

The thing is: I really have no idea how they are doing this.

So, how would I implement something like this on my site using Apache
and PHP? What is the technical term for this style of 'URL re-writing'
even called? I don't mind doing a little research on my own, but I can't
seem to nail down exactly what keywords I need to search for in the
first place!

Any pointers or examples would be greatly appreciated.

Look up 'mod_rewrite' for the Apache implementation of this sort of rewriting.

e.g. for a format of /archives/2004/04/03/ you may have a rewrite rule such as
(except all on one line):

RewriteRule /archives/([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/
/articles.php?year=$1&month=$2&day=$3

--
Andy Hassall <an**@andyh.co.uk> / Space: disk usage analysis tool
http://www.andyh.co.uk / http://www.andyhsoftware.co.uk/space