A couple of months ago, on our PLUS site, I wrote a tutorial focused on creating a static search engine that spidered down through a site hierarchy and searched each web page that it found for a given text string. This type of search was aimed at owners of web sites consisting of static HTML pages. In this tutorial + screencast we’re going to do the same thing, but this time instead of navigating folders and subfolders looking for pages, we’re going to search a database instead. Join today!

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In this tutorial, we’re going to be building an image scroller, making use of jQuery’s excellent animation features and generally having some fun with code. Image scrollers are of course nothing new; versions of them come out all the time. Many of them however are user-initiated; meaning that in order for the currently displayed content to change, the visitor must click a button or perform some other action. This scroller will be different in that it will be completely autonomous and will begin scrolling once the page loads.

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The Progress Bar is one of the latest components to be added to the excellent library of UI widgets and interaction helpers built on top of jQuery. It was introduced in the latest version of the library, which at the time of writing is 1.7.

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In this tutorial we’re going to be creating a widget for our web pages which allows visitors to search the contents of our site. We’ll be using jQuery to pass the search term to the back-end, and to receive and display the results. We’ll be using PHP to search for the term in a local site and then return any matching URLs back to the page as a JSON object. Join today!

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In this article, we’re going to look at how we create a simple but effective means of capturing and displaying visitor comments using a blend of jQuery, PHP and JSON. In the public forum that is the blogosphere, the ability to capture and display visitor comments on your blogs can give you instant feedback and opinions from the people that matter most – those that read your blog.

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I’m proud to launch our first ever PLUS tutorial, exclusive to members. For this flagship tut, veteran developer/writer Dan Wellman - author of the recently released jQuery UI 1.6, from Packt publishing - will teach you how to build an advanced “poll” jQuery plugin. Not only will you have a lengthy tutorial to study, but we’ll also provide a companion video tutorial to assist.

To celebrate our first PLUS tutorial, I also have some free books to give away, courtesy of Packt!.

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A tag-cloud is a great way of showing visitors to your blog the main topics of interest that are available. There is also additional information contained in a tag-cloud. Aside from the actual links themselves, which give people an idea of the subjects that your site covers, they can also show how popular the different subjects are. Another great thing about tag-clouds is that they can be used to describe the frequency of anything; you can link to articles, blog posts, images, video, or anything else that you have in abundance on your site.

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In this article we’re going to be building our very own jQuery plugin step-by-step from scratch; jQuery makes this task exceptionally easy for us, giving us a simple method of packaging up our scripts and exposing their functionality, and encouraging the use of scalable and reusable object-oriented techniques.

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