In httpd.conf:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteMap urlshort txt:/path/to/file/map.txt
RewriteRule ^/s/([a-zA-Z0-9]+)$ ${urlshort:$1} [R]
in map.txt:
abcdef http://www.foo.com/blah/
bcdefg http://www.bar.com/foo/
The RewriteRule can be tweaked (removing the /s, using a fixed-length key, whatever) as long as whatever matches in the parens is the key to the map.txt table. And map.txt could be a different kind of map (including an external program that looks the key up in a DB, logs the request, etc.)
I was recently asked about enabling mod_concat on the work servers to make it easier to combine things like .js and .css files into a single request. It works nicely:
<script src="foo.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="bar.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
becomes
<script src="./??foo.js,bar.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
This is nice and it’s reasonable with Last-Modified-Date headers, etc. But if you have some PHP files in your document tree and request something like this:
http://www.foo.com/blah/??foo.php,bar.php
It’ll expose unparsed PHP which is almost never what you want to happen.
The right solution, obviously, would be to use subrequests to get the content back from each file and then concatenate all of that. But that’s much more complicated and 90% of the time unnecessary: how often do you really want to combine the output of two dynamic URLs but can’t just do it within the application?
Anyway…the obvious answer was to just not do it. Let mod_concat return static files that would have been returned but the standard static content handler, but bail on everything else. This patch does exactly that.
Chicken of the Web 