.htaccess and url rewrite

Question

I know that url_rewrite using .htaccess requires an identifier in the pretty url by which we identify the page/link to load. But, here are a few examples where i can't make out the identifier.

Any ideas how do they do it?

http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/15/julie-ann-horvath-describes-sexism-and-intimidation-behind-her-github-exit/

http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/15/why-we-hate-google-glass-and-all-new-tech/

In both the examples above, the portion http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/15/ is constant. Any ideas on how to do this would be welcome.

Answer 1

There's a lookup based on the "category" and "page name". It uses both "2014/03/15", or the date, as well as the name of the post, "julie-ann-horvath-describes-sexism-and-intimidation-behind-her-github-exit" to fetch the dynamic content. This makes it so you wouldn't really need an ID unless you happen to have 2 posts with the exact same title on the same date. The fetch from the database is a little more complicated with this method, since the title in the URL isn't always going to be the title in the database because the title text needs to be cleaned of special characters and spaces so that it reads nicely within a URL. For example:

/whats-with-all-of-these-titles-in-urls/

Could have a page title: "What's with all of these titles in URLs"

So you can see the ' is removed, the spaces are changed to -'s and everything is made lowercase. CMS's handle this by creating what's called a "slug". The "whats-with-all-of-these-titles-in-urls" title is the "slug" while the real title is "What's with all of these titles in URLs". The slug is stored alongside the title in the database, and is ensured to be unique, at least within each category. This way, the slug is sort of like a numerical ID and is used, along with the category (but not necessarily), to fetch the page content from the database.