I cannot for the life of me get this to work. I'm using this tutorial to make clean URLs: http://www.desiquintans.com/cleanurls.
So I have my domain, example.com, which is hosted using GoDaddy under the "Linux with cPanel control panel" plan. I uploaded a blank file called index.php. In the same folder, I uploaded .htaccess with this code:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9]+)$ index.php?page=$1
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9]+)/$ index.php?page=$1
When I type example.com/index.php?page=blahblahblah, the URL doesn't change to example.com/blahblahblah like it should. It doesn't change at all.
I've tried it on MAMP and it didn't work either. I tried changing the httpd.conf file for MAMP as well, but that didn't do anything.
I just need some pretty URLs, even if I have to manually say, "index.php?id=12344545 [goes to] example.com/mysubpage" for each individual page.
How can I achieve pretty URLs using .htaccess?
EDIT: I wasn't actually doing anything wrong with the .htaccess file, I just misunderstood a crucial concept pointed out my @Rasclatt:
"You have to change your links, not reformat what's in your address bar".
I just need to change my site's hyperlinks to the pretty URLs.