Shorten URL for listing

Please be more elaborate....

Well,

I have a website where customers place ads.

The actual link from within the website would be, as an example:http://www.mysite.com/listingview.php?listingID=17
or
http://www.mysite.com/listingview.php?listingID=18
and so on....

I would like to shorten the link to something like:
http://www.mysite.com/listingID=17

So that if the advertiser has a newspaper ad they can include the simple internet link http://www.mysite.com/listingID=17 in the add rather than
the more difficult:
http://www.mysite.com/listingview.php?listingID=17

Does that make sense?

NYColt

If you use Unix/Linux hosting you could use mod rewrite to redirect to make the url look something like

http://www.mysite.com/listing/17

You would need to add something like this to either your httpd.conf or a .htaccess file

RewriteRule ^/listing/\([0-9]{1,4})$ /listingview.php?newsID=$1 [L]'

I think that should work. Can't promise you though... its not really one of my specialities.

great I will try that and let you know how it works

I added the code to a .htaccess file but I get a "page cannot be found" message.

Hello Andy,

I got this to work great.

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/([0-9]+)$
RewriteRule ^(.*) /listingview.php?listingID=%1 [L,R]

This produces this:

http://www.mysite.com/17 or another variable

Very Simple and clean, just what I needed!

Hope this thread helps someone else down the trail!

Thanks for the look and see and input on this issue.

NYColt

Congratulations! I hope it helps people as well, cos it took me absolutly ages to get my head round it when I first wanted to use it!