HTACCESS Friendly URL doesnt work

Hi Jason, I tried that it has no effect. interestingly I know if you do the slightest mistake in HTACCESS that it completely stops the website working..in my case the website is still accessable which means that syntax is playing friendly. I will check out those forums you mentioned.

Also Jamie, I will try your php method on my testing server which will give me more time to experiment. Im just cofused why it cannot work simply by htaccess only method like most users use on the web that I have seen.

Also Jamie, if you know any more on htaccess.Im trying to get Firefox's YSLOW to have a better score, currently I have a score of 82..but this will be a lot higher soon as i upgraded my 1and1 hosting which now supports CDN hosting via cloudflare. which means GZIP and Use a Content Delivery Network will get a score of "A"

the only parts that I score low on are :

Add Expire Headers (Scored F)
Configure Entity Tags (ETags) (Scored D)

I have this snippet of code fr htaccess and wondered if correct as it has no effect on my score if I place this code in:

(also I believe it screws up my CSS file, when I installed it earlier my CSS was wiped..possible cause last night I minified my CSS file and it screwed up the website for some reason...so perhaps it was stilll caching that minifed version).

<ifModule mod_expires.c>
  ExpiresActive On
  ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 seconds"
  ExpiresByType text/html "access plus 1 seconds"
  ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 2592000 seconds"
  ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 2592000 seconds"
  ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 2592000 seconds"
  ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 604800 seconds"
  ExpiresByType text/javascript "access plus 216000 seconds"
  ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access plus 216000 seconds"
</ifModule>

<ifModule mod_headers.c>
  <filesMatch "\\.(ico|pdf|flv|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|swf)$">
    Header set Cache-Control "max-age=2592000, public"
  </filesMatch>
  <filesMatch "\\.(css)$">
    Header set Cache-Control "max-age=604800, public"
  </filesMatch>
  <filesMatch "\\.(js)$">
    Header set Cache-Control "max-age=216000, private"
  </filesMatch>
  <filesMatch "\\.(xml|txt)$">
    Header set Cache-Control "max-age=216000, public, must-revalidate"
  </filesMatch>
  <filesMatch "\\.(html|htm|php)$">
    Header set Cache-Control "max-age=1, private, must-revalidate"
  </filesMatch>
</ifModule>

<ifModule mod_headers.c>
  Header unset ETag
</ifModule>
FileETag None