Mike, you made my day with this answer.

@Jesse Take the red pill

Hey Mark,

did this work for you? 
Would be happy to hear back.

In the meantime enjoy your weekend

Christoph

Hey Mark,

it is only 07:21 right now, but I updated my original answer.

Hope you still accept my premature answer

Christoph

Hey Mark,

I should not answer questions in around 6 a.m. Sorry for that

My example works only when you want to redirect from an old domain  to a new one - or from http://www.domain.com to http://domain.com

If you want the links to be on the same domain, things get tricky quite fast. I'll deep dive into the documentation and be right back

Hey Mark,

Finally a question that I can answer (yay!)

I use the following code on my website:

<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.it-engelhardt.de/$1 [R=301]</ifmodule>

It basically takes every URL like http://itengelhardt.de/microconf-2013-hub-page/

and just redirects it (301 of course!) to http://www.it-engelhardt.de/microconf-2013-hub-page/

UPDATE 1:  (after carefully re-reading the question)

OK, hopefully this is the correct answer to your question:

**Assumptions I made: **

• You want to extract the category name from the query string (i.e. everything after the '?')
• "ns=catshow" in the query string stands for "category show" and tells the server to show a category

Then this is hopefully what you want:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ns=catshow
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ref=([^&]+)
RewriteRule ^index.php /Category/%1? [R=301]

**What it does: **

1. checks if "ns=catshow" is present in the query string
2. extracts the value from the "ref=" variable in the query string and stores it in %1
3. rewrites every request to the server, that matches conditions 1. and 2. and starts with "index.php" to /Category/%1

4. the "?" at the end of "/Category/%1?" tells the server to throw away the original query string - this might not be desirable, if not: remove the '?'
5. the [R=301] tells the server to redirect using HTTP 301

Tested with: http://htaccess.madewithlove.be/

Mike, you made my day with this answer.

@Jesse Take the red pill

Hey Mark,

I should not answer questions in around 6 a.m. Sorry for that

My example works only when you want to redirect from an old domain  to a new one - or from http://www.domain.com to http://domain.com

If you want the links to be on the same domain, things get tricky quite fast. I'll deep dive into the documentation and be right back