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mod_rewrite provides an effective way to make short/friendly URLs and it also makes your site more attractive for search engine crawlers.

You can enable mod_rewrite for Apache 1.3 with the below steps easily.

First step
Remove '#' in front of
LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so
Make sure 'mod_rewrite.so' is available under 'apache installation directory/modules'.

Second step
Remove '#' in front of
AddModule mod_rewrite.c

Third step
Set AllowOverride to any of these
AllowOverride FileInfo Options
or
AllowOverride All

Rember, you will find 2 instances of AllowOverride. One like
<Directory />
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
</Directory>

and the 2nd one similar to

<Directory "C:/Program Files/Apache Group/Apache/htdocs">
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>

Change the value in the 2nd instance.
Don't forget to restart Apache for these changes to take affect.

A cool mod_rewrite cheat sheet.