Okay, the titles a little inaccurate but 43 Folders posted a link to a great Wikipedia article full of .htaccess goodness.
.htaccess is a configuration file that you can drop into your website to achieve lots of cool stuff such as:
- Password Protection
- Hotlinking prevention
- Redirects
- Preventing search engines from crawling your content
- Lots and lots more.
The syntax for using .htaccess is a little scary looking but with the examples on the Wikipedia page and the links given to external resources on the page you’ll be flying in no time.