wildcard redirecting

Sorry, I couldn't think of a well-worded, descriptive title for what I'm trying to do. As I believe I mentioned before, I use PHP and MySQL to keep a journal. all the entries are accessed by /index.phtml?id=23 , where "23" is replaced by the id of the entry you want. A "problem" I'm having is that some search engines' spiders (google, most notably), won't navigate through all the different ?id= variants, even though they are all linked together. The solution I thought of would be to make /23.phtml point to the same location, by parsing the id out of the url. Then the spiders would crawl through all the individual pages and store them all. I got this to work just fine. Now what I would like is, rather than creating 100+ files (even if all they contain is an include(); ), to ake a way where any /n.phtml brings up the same batch of code. really te only soltion I could come up with was to change my ErrorDocument in .htaccess to point a 404 to a custom page in the directory, containing the url parsing code, or, if it detects a non-numeric file, display a default 404 message. The problem with that was that apache would actually redirect the browser, and the URL would be replaced with /404.phtml, losing the variable/ url. Also $http_referrer would be suspiciously blank. Anyone know a way I can succeed at the above? Or, even more delightful, a better way to achieve it? thanks --kevin