URL redirects for URL shortening

Factual Questions
1

What’s the best way to go about this?

I have software on my website that I can use to make slideshows. It’s all admin’ed via a web-based admin page. The way this software creates the slideshows is there’s a general page like:

[noparse]mywebsite.com is available for purchase - Sedo.com

that is a menu of slideshows. If you click on a slideshow, you get redirected to something like [noparse]mywebsite.com is available for purchase - Sedo.com

Now, I want to give my clients direct links, but rather than giving them a URL like

[noparse]mywebsite.com is available for purchase - Sedo.com

I want to give them a URL like

[noparse]mywebsite.com is available for purchase - Sedo.com

What’s the best way to do this, and is it possible to do it in such a manner that [noparse]mywebsite.com is available for purchase - Sedo.com stays in the URL bar and doesn’t change to [noparse]mywebsite.com is available for purchase - Sedo.com That part is not crucial, but it would be nice. I know I’ve done something like this before, but I can’t remember which URL redirect method I settled on.

2

Well, I just ended up doing it with a simple redirect in .htaccess. If anyone has a better idea, feel free to add, but that works for now.

3

There may be config entries for the webserver’s config …

basically you want the rewrite rule, so that even though the slideshow software is producing the URL /slideshow/?/page/a12c/nameofslideshow, the web server is rewriting the outgoing URL TOO and so the slideshow software believes it lives at /slideshow/?/page/a12c/nameofslideshow , but the Outside world only sees /nameofslideshow