If you want to go ahead and shorten URL even further, you can even use letters "F" and "L" instead of firstname and lastname.

For example, try this in your page:

And then use this URL (substituting with your correct URL, of course):

http://www.your.host/sales.php?f=Oscar&l=Grouch

The result is same. I think we want our URLs to look a little better, though.

The format I used in that above example was:

http://www.your.host/sales.php?f=Big&l=Bird

Now, problem with this is that this link looks really ugly. Another setback with this format is that anything to right of "?" won't be indexed by some of smaller search engines.

Here's a way to change this:

http://www.your.host/sales.php?f=Firstname&l=Lastname

To this:

http://www.your.host/sales.php/f=Firstname/l=Lastname

It's really easy. Just change your script to this:

$myvars = explode("/",$REQUEST_URI); for ($i=0;$iecho "$f $l";

?>

And in just a few lines of code, your personalized PHP script's URL just looked a whole lot better.

I won't bore you with details of what that script does, but it basically chops up URL you gave it and picks out pieces it wants using array exploding and variable-variables.

This snippet can also be used on almost any PHP script as well. (I used this method when I coded Brian Garvin's Lightning Track ad tracker... if you ever see a URL anywhere with "go.php/etc" in it, that's my script.)

Hopefully we all learned something today. This mini-tutorial was brought to you by letters "P-H-P."

Article by Robert Plank

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Pluses and minuses of Macromedia Dreamweaver:

1. You can build your own templates and use them to edit hundreds of pages of your website with one single click. Although Dreamweaver adds some comment tags to html file to distinguish editable and non-editable areas and I read in one forum that people experience some troubles applying template to more then 700 pages as they ran out of memory but I had never chance to test that.

2. Pages done with Dreamweaver usually have less trash in coding. They look almost perfect with Netscape, Opera and MS Explorer.

3. Dreamweaver doing amazing thing with SSI files and other server side include technology. Php code looks much nicer however with ASP scripts FrontPage still better.

4. Dreamweaver is much better interacts with other macromedia products.

5. Both editors in most cases display CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) correctly. But if you enter style attribute twice in Dreamweaver for