Vanity URL Rewrites Best Practices?

[Nick Tkach <ntkach@xxxxxxxxx>]

Does anyone have any pointers/suggestions on the best way to do vanity url rewrites?

For example,

  
 http://foo.com/mmh/maintenance_plan/tip?contentCategoryType=MaintenanceTip&id=%2Fwww%2Favm_webapps%2Fmmh%2Fmaintenance-tips%2Fcontent%2Fafter_blizzard.xml  

Being sent to

  
 http://foo.com/mmh/articles/authored/after-blizzard


We've got a very frequent process where we'll get a huge block of rewrites like this that vary just by the last part and so far just keep going through and adding dozens and dozens of new rewrite rules each time.  Surely there has to be a better way?  (Ideally that just involve Apache changes and not code changes on the back-end)