Benjamin Kuker

Benjamin KukerBenjamin Kuker is the co-founder of Virtuosi Media with his beautiful wife, Johanna.

Benjamin is responsible for the design and maintenance of this website. He spends most of his time working with clients or developing future products for Virtuosi Media (stay tuned!).

When he does have free time, Benjamin enjoys reading, writing, sports, and traveling. His last name is pronounced Kee-ker, even though it's spelled Kuker. No one seems to know why. To date, no one in his life has ever pronounced Benjamin's last name correctly, but you would probably make his day if you were the first to do so.

Benjamin's Work

 

  • Tutorial: How To Create RSS Feeds

    You've probably seen them on the web, even if you don't know what they're used for; those little orange buttons that look like they're broadcasting something are everywhere. They're links to RSS feeds. In this tutorial, we'll explore some of the uses for RSS feeds, why your website should have them, and you'll also learn how to make static feeds with XML and dynamic feeds using PHP.

    In its simplest form, RSS is really just a list of similar links with a title and description. RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication and it is a dialect of XML. RSS comes in three versions: 0.91, 0.92, and 2.0; with version 2.0 as the most current and common version. You can download the sample files for this tutorial here.

    How is RSS used?

    RSS is used in many different ways by both people and websites. In general, because RSS works as a syndication channel for a list of links, any consumer of the information in that channel is called a subscriber.

    One of the largest benefits to RSS is that you can view headlines from multiple sites without having to visit them directly. This is usually done using a program called a feed reader, which gathers all of the different RSS feeds that you instruct it to and displays them in a central location. Although there are many different feed readers out there, Google Reader and My Yahoo! are two of the more popular ones.

    Many RSS feeds are updated dynamically whenever new content is added and thus enable subscribers to visit sites only when there are updates. This saves an enormous amount of time for users who wish to keep track of news or information on a variety of websites. Some RSS feeds even contain the entire piece of content and allow subscribers to view it without ever having to leave their feed reader.

    Websites can also get the contents of an RSS feed and display them as a section of their website. Because websites aren't limited to just their own RSS feeds, this allows them to display content from all over the internet. Although we won't cover reading RSS feeds in this tutorial, displaying external RSS feeds on your site can be a great way to augement your already existing content.

    Learn How To Create RSS Feeds

  • CSS Rounded Corners Menus

    So, you want to make multiple valid cross-browser, rounded corner navigation buttons that are resizable, have a hover state, degrade gracefully, and use only CSS and one image? No problem.

    I've looked at a few rounded corner solutions, but so far I haven't really found what I was looking for, so I decided to try working it out myself. I wanted a solution that was lightweight, valid, cross-browser, and didn't require JavaScript. The technique I came up with isn't the end all solution for rounded corners and I'm sure that I'm not the first to use it, but it did meet my needs, and so I'm satisfied with the result. The only caveat I'll make before we dive into the code is that I did end up needing a single line of JavaScript in order to make Internet Explorer 6 function properly without flickering. Let's get started.

    Learn How To Create Cross-Browser CSS Rounded Corners

  • Ultimate IE6 Cheatsheet: How To Fix 25+ Internet Explorer 6 Bugs

    The best strategy for dealing with Internet Explorer 6 is not to support it.

    Stop. Ok, I feel your frustration. You're a web developer and you're ready to tear your hair out because you have to support Internet Explorer 6, but, to put it tactfully, IE6 doesn't support you. You've spent hours on it, but you just can't seem to get your layout right. I can empathize. I can also help.

    This isn't one of those rants about IE6 or a campaign to try to kill it. There are enough of those around the web, but they don't help if you need to support IE6 because it still has a significant enough marketshare that you can't ignore it for business reasons. No, this is the resource you've been hoping for.

    I've scoured the web for resources and also included some of my own fixes for IE6 and now I've put it all together in this cheatsheet/reference manual as a resource for anyone who has to deal with Internet Explorer 6. Where possible, I've done my best to provide the cleanest and valid solutions to each bug instead of ugly hacks. I've also tried to give proper credit for each case, but some of the solutions have been shared so many times that finding the original discover of each fix is difficult. If you see a missing credit or if I missed a bug and fix, please contact me and let me know and I'll update this page.

    This massive IE6 guide took a while to put together, so bookmark it, share it, tweet it, and use it to save yourself and your coworkers hours of screaming at your monitor and banging your head against your desk or other inanimate objects. Don't be fooled, however, this cheatsheet is as much for me as it is for you.

    Get relief from IE6

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Copyright 2011 Virtuosi Media Inc.