Smooth, seamless redirection?

Hi There,

I'm playing around with a little social networking project and I'd like
people to be able to view their profiles and what-not using a nice clean URL.
You see this kind of thing all the time on big sites, like this...

http://bestuff.com/stuff/spider-pig

....I doubt that Bestuff have a folder called 'spider-pig' with a load of
HTML in it (because that have thousands of such categories.)

I've got it working (sort-of) in IIS with a folder that is permanently
redirected to a program, like this...

/user.aspx?URL=$V&PARAMS=$P

....but when the user gets to the page, the URL in their address bar is in
that nasty form...

http://localhost/user/JasonTimmins

....becomes...

http://localhost/user.aspx?URL=JasonTimmins&PARAMS=

How can I keep the original/nice URL after the redirection?

(I'm using all the standard stuff; IIS6, .NET v2, etc.)

Cheers
Jason.

PS. I guess it'd help if I actually knew what this technique was called and
then I could go an find a solution for myself. :-)

RE: Smooth, seamless redirection?

Hi There,

Don't worry about it fellas, I've found a solution...

http://aspalliance.com/1234_TipTrick_Url_Rewriting_with_ASPN ET

Approach 2 uses URLWriter.net (http://urlrewriter.net/) which works
beautifully for me.

This technique seems to be referred to a 'search engine friendly URLs',
which seems fair enough.

Cheers
Jason.

"Jason Timmins" wrote:

> Hi There,
>
> I'm playing around with a little social networking project and I'd like
> people to be able to view their profiles and what-not using a nice clean URL.
> You see this kind of thing all the time on big sites, like this...
>
> http://bestuff.com/stuff/spider-pig
>
> ...I doubt that Bestuff have a folder called 'spider-pig' with a load of
> HTML in it (because that have thousands of such categories.)
>
> I've got it working (sort-of) in IIS with a folder that is permanently
> redirected to a program, like this...
>
> /user.aspx?URL=$V&PARAMS=$P
>
> ...but when the user gets to the page, the URL in their address bar is in
> that nasty form...
>
> http://localhost/user/JasonTimmins
>
> ...becomes...
>
> http://localhost/user.aspx?URL=JasonTimmins&PARAMS=
>
> How can I keep the original/nice URL after the redirection?
>
> (I'm using all the standard stuff; IIS6, .NET v2, etc.)
>
> Cheers
> Jason.
>
> PS. I guess it'd help if I actually knew what this technique was called and
> then I could go an find a solution for myself. :-)