Hey there Dr Smithmeister!
Adding the complexity of partial page loads to your website indicates that you're working on improving performance, suggesting to me that you'd be interested in a web server tuned more for performance than Apache.
Even if you've used it in the past, Nginx has improved a lot recently - it's got a whole bunch of in-depth documentation, plus some cool features that definitely make it better than Apache. Give it a spin and see what you think.
To get you started, here's an example of how your could implement those rewrite rules in Nginx...
EDITED: 12 Sep 2015 15:05 by BOUGHTONP