I had a written some code to generate dynamic images on our website. I soon discovered that my images were not being listed in Google’s image section. The following URL generates the required image: https://www.emogic.com/barcode/barcode.php?code=001600064300&mode=gif However, when I tried to save it to my desktop it saves it as barcode.php.png . Google will not list it in it’s image section as ‘barcode.php?code=001600064300&mode=gif’ is not a valid name for an image file. One solution was to have my script save the generated image to my server. Then I could redirect web browser’s to the generated image by returning the text:
META HTTP-EQUIV=”Refresh” CONTENT=”0; URL=/barcode/images/001600064300.gif”
But by doing that I am using up valuable space on our web host. It would be nice if I could have the URL:
https://www.somewhereincanada.com/barcode/images/001600064300.gif
call my script and dynamically generate the image. This is possible by using Apache’s Module mod_rewrite. By using mod_rewrite, I can cause the previous URL to call the script barcode.php See: https://www.workingwith.me.uk/articles/scripting/mod_rewrite for more information. To see mod_rewrite in action, try replacing any of the digits in the following URL with another. Likewise try replacing .gif with .jpg or .png https://www.somewhereincanada.com/barcode/images/001600064300.gif Now Google will see links of this format as actual images on my site and index them. To make it all work, the following was required: In an .htaccess file in our /barcode/ directory is the following text: RewriteEngine On RewriteBase /barcode/images/ RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule . /barcode/barcode.php [L] The previous .htaccess file tells Apache to turn web requests for: /barcode/images/001600064300.gif to /barcode/barcode.php Note that the folder ‘/barcode/images/’ does not even exist.
https://www.somewhereincanada.com/barcode/images/hjgksad/asd/asd/001600064300.gif
will generate an image also! On my first attempt, I added the following code to barcode.php. It strips out the ‘001600064300? and ‘gif’ parts from /barcode/images/001600064300.gif found in the PHP variable $_SERVER[“REQUEST_URI”]. Then took those two values and fed them into the routines that would have normally obtained the values from ?code=001600064300&mode=gif if ($code == ”) { $URIline = $_SERVER[“REQUEST_URI”]; //split uri into parts $urlparts = array(); $urlparts = split(”/”, $URIline); //get last part image.jpg $imagename = array_pop($urlparts); $filenameparts = array(); $filenameparts = split(”.”, $imagename); $code = $filenameparts[0]; $mode = $filenameparts[1]; //file extension if ($mode == ”) { $mode=’png’; } } If you are comfortable with Regular Expressions, there is a better way to accomplish this. I could have used mod_rewrite to turn: https://www.somewhereincanada.com/barcode/images/001600064300.gif directly into a call to: https://www.somewhereincanada.com/barcode/barcode.php?code=001600064300&mode=gif Then I would not have had to modify barcode.php Here is how I obtained the same results by using Regular Expressions in .htaccess: RewriteEngine On RewriteBase /barcode/images/ RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule ([0-9]+).([a-zA-Z]+)$ /barcode/barcode.php?code=$1&mode=$2 [L] Apache staff say mod_rewrite is difficult to master. So keep it simple.
https://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/mod/mod_rewrite.html