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Site-Specific Search: Quick & Easy

A site-specific search capability is a nice feature to be able to add to a web site. If a site is large and content-rich such an addition can be an indispensable aid. However, creating your own search engine can be intimidating even for an experienced web programmer. This article will show how to create a site-specific search engine. No programming skills will be required to implement the code presented here but the reader should be familiar with HTML and would benefit by having some understanding of scripting languages.

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Review of CSS Cookbook

Like many developers, I am familiar with O'Reilly books and have come to expect high quality material from this publisher. I know their "Cookbook" format of books, having made extensive use of the "PHP Cookbook". To top it all off, my standard reference for CSS is published by this publisher. So, needless to say, when trying to decide upon another CSS book I was naturally drawn towards O'Reilly.

Secure Web Transactions using PayPal

PayPal is a convenient way of accepting payment over the internet, especially for small to medium-sized businesses. In an earlier article, I described how to integrate a third party shopping cart with PayPal. Reading that article, while not essential, will be helpful in following this discussion. You may find it at http://www.softcoded.com/paypal/paypal_php.php. Readers of that article raised a number of questions related to security.

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Content Management Using PHP-Nuke

PHP-Nuke is a free web application self-described as a web portal system but it might more accurately be characterised as a content management system. This article discusses what a content management system is and why you might want one, giving examples of current sites that use PHP-Nuke. After reading this article you should be able to decide whether PHP-Nuke suits your needs.

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Release 5 of PHP

July 13 2004 marks the official release date of PHP 5. But so what? Well, as early as 2002 PHP was the most dominant server-side scripting language and it has continued to grow by leaps and bounds since. What started out as a hobby language called, Personal Home Page has grown up to become PHP Hypertext Preprocessor.

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Java Error Display Class

When a method throws an exception, Java requires that it be caught. Some exceptions require action on the programmer's part and others simply need to be reported to the user. The Java class that we will develop in this article is concerned with the latter type of exception. Instead of rewriting code every time you need to catch an exception, you can create a class to do most of the work for you.

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