What Does This Mean

Need a little assistance on trying to tackle a project

[Hova_187]

Hey Guys,

As some of you might know, I'm totally new to this. I'm knowledgeable in HTML, and Flash, but I need some assistance. I've been trying to set up my affiliate account with FindWhat, and my problem is getting the search box properly installed on my site. I was just wondering what this means

"An HTML encoded text string representing what the user is searching for. It is important that the text string is encoded properly according to RFC1738. Specifically, non-alphanumeric characters must be encoded as per this excerpt from RFC1738"

Any info would be appreciated. If you guys have any tips, or advice on this topic, let me know. I have a programmer who does most of my integration stuff, but I wanted to try it on my own. Plus programmers can certainly pull a premium. Thanks in advance!

Joel

[justageek]

It simply means that you need to have the format as the spec says. So when you query FW your mt variable cannot be 'tropical island' but rather 'tropical%20island'. If you read the spec you will see it's not that big of a deal to implement.

[Hova_187]

Thanks just a geek,

I guess, I'm just a little confused. What do I set my mt variable as? Here is the xml data they sent me, now I just dont what to do with it!

[us01.xmlsearch.findwhat.com...]

Any ideas? It says it has to be parsed, and aspdaddy sent me a sample script, but I'm not sure exactly how to implement it all. THanks man!

Joel

[justageek]

http://www.webmasterworld.com/redir.cgi?f=88&d=1657&url=http://us01.xmlsearch.findwhat.com/bin/findwhat.dll
?getresults&base=0&mt=health&dc=10&aff_id=xxxxx&ip_addr=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

&base is the starting point of the result set. So set it to 1 if you want the top bidder.

&mt is the search term you are requesting listings about.

&dc is the ending point so set it to 10 to get 10 results back

&aff_id is the affiliate id they gave you.

&ip_address is the ip of the person who is doing the search.

Normally all of these will be dynamic and you will have to set them before you do the file() to get the results. The results will be in xml so just parse them and show them.

[edited by: jatar_k at 5:11 pm (utc) on Sep. 5, 2003]
[edit reason] fixed sidescroll [/edit]

[Hova_187]

Thanks again Just a geek,

I understand now what each one means, but how do I set them, and go about parsing them. The thing I'm most confused about is, how am I going to know what people are searcing for? That MT trips me out. In the url they sent, it had "Health" in there, I guess I'm just lost. I do catch on pretty quick, I just need a direction in where to start. Thanks man!

Joel

[justageek]

Check your stickymail.