NETTTUS.com has a new tutorial that talks about "pretty URLs" and how you can make them happen on your site by combining a bit of htaccess/mod_rewrite magic with PHP.

While some claim pretty URLs help in search engine rankings, the debate here is fierce, we can all agree that pretty URLs make things easier for our users and adds a level of professionalism and polish to any web application.

To illustrate how it works, they create a simple URL shortening site, showing the difference between the two different methods (htaccess in Apache and PHP's URL handling) along the way. The application's pretty simple - store a URL in a MySQL database to be accessed via a special hash coming from the URL.