Cloak, shorten or snip your affiliate links (URLs) vs TinyURL

If you have webhosting and own a domain, you simply have to place a text file into the root folder of your domain and rename it to .htaccess (the "dot" is very important, also make sure it has NO extension - remove the .txt at the end) with the following line in it:

redirect 301 /[LinkYouWantToUse] /[YourLongAffiliateLink]

Stop Hotlinking with .htaccess

If your download quota on your website counts or in case it's not very fast anyway, it might be a good idea to disallow others to hotlink (put a direct link on their website) to images of your website. Doing so, every time somebody clicks that hotlink, they're going to use the bandwidth of your hosting server and, depending on the size of the image, may even slow it down.

Fortunately there's a solution for that which is, again, a nice .htaccess trick. Here you'll find a well built article about how to Stop Hotlinking with .htaccess.

Hide File Extension with .htaccess

While browsing in some websites, I realized that in some cases I cannot see the extension of the page that they created for one or another page on the website. I decided to dig into this and found a very good article about this: Hide file extensions in URLs.

Some .htaccess abreviations:
NC - "No Case" - ignore upper and lower case
OR - "Or Next" - apply rule in this line or next line
L - "Last" - stop applying rules

Some more info about .htaccess + mod_rewrite

Today I was trying to look for .htaccess commands to make sure that my subdomain I setup, stays in the address bar, just like it is in case of this blog, webeno.blogspot.com. I got a bit disctracted by visiting some otherwise very useful articles, like Ultimate htaccess Examples, the .htaccess Tutorial thread of AskApache.com, or the one about domain masking with .htaccess at Site5.com Forums but, however being very detailed and needy in some cases, none of them provided me with the solution I needed. So finally I stumbled upon a website called Mod_Rewrite Forums and posted this thread: subdomain to stay in address bar. Hope it gets solved soon! ;)

Update:
The solution of this thread can be found in my post of the 7/17/09: Subdomain to stay in address bar.

Avoiding duplicate content + .htacess tricks

Another important factor in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is avoiding duplicate content. This RagePank.com (mind the swapped first letters of the 2 words - genious!) article gives some information as to how it is taken by the search engines and how you can prevent duplicate content by using some .htaccess commands. Some of the commands can be setup through the standard user interface of your domain provider, but sometimes .htaccess is really very useful to know about it a little bit more. Another fine compilation of basic .htaccess commands can be found here .htaccess Tutorial - Part 1.

Did you know?
The dot (".") before the file name means that it's hidden, so only website administrators can access and modify it.