This Space for Rent

The Apache web server (no, I'm not going to provide a link. It's only the most popular webserver in the world, so you can find out how to get it by the expected means) has a spiffy feature called "mod_rewrite" that can be used to convert urls from one form to another with almost no limitations.

It's pretty cool; I've been using it to keep bandwidth pirates away from my images, so I'm pretty happy with it, except for two teeny little details;

1. The documentation sucks dead bunnies through a straw.
2. There's no easy way to test mod_rewrite scripts without firing up the stupid webserver and randomly typing urls in to see what happens. And, because apache is apache and doesn't need to be friendly, it isn't. Until I figured out the clever trick of doing redirecting rewrites to nonexistant hostnames, I'd tweak the mod-rewrite strings over and over and over, only to get my somewhat less than helpful 404 (no file found, eh?) page.

I know that the whole web business is a mass of deliberately impenetrable standards (it's as if the people at w3c woke up one morning and realized "my god, people can actually implement this design!"), but it's still extraordinarily annoying to have the swiss army battleship of webservers sit there and pout like a second-grader when you haven't been able to figure out the right goddamn juju to make it convert /~orc/silly/wiki into /~orc/stupid.php&page=silly/wiki.