Staying up to date

When it comes to web development things change quickly—extremely quickly.

Part of our job is making sure to keep our skills sharp and stay up-to-date on everything that’s happening in The Web World.

Feeds & feed readers

My favourite way to stay up-to-date is by reading a whole bunch of articles and websites daily, probably about 500 or so. (Yeah, I know, I’m obsessive.)

I manage all this through a feed reader and feeds like RSS & Atom. I subscribe to all the websites I’m interested in and the feed reader automatically checks and syncs all the websites, showing me only the new articles.

Feed readers

Here’s a couple feed readers that might work for you—test them out and choose the one that works for you.

Feed reader apps

I like to check my feeds on all my devices, not just my laptop, so I use an application to sync all my devices.

I use the web application as a syncing system for the applications, and the applications are the interface for reading the articles.

Double check that the feed reader you’ve chosen above syncs with the application you want to use.

Starter list of feeds

Linked below is a starting list of websites to subscribe to—I’ve culled through my list and picked the most appropriate feeds for web and graphic designers.

⬇ Download feed list

You can import this list into any feed reader application you choose.

Save for later

Often, there’s lots and lots of articles that I’d like to read, but don’t have time immediately. I like to save my articles later.

  • Pinboard — a permanent bookmarking service
  • Instapaper — a temporary bookmarking service

E-mail newsletters

If you don’t want to cull through hundreds of articles a day, you can try subscribing to a bunch of web development related e-mail newsletters.

Here’s a few I subscribe to:

Twitter

Lots of people like to use Twitter to stay up-to-date. If that’s you, check out the list of Blogs, companies & people for a bunch of Twitter usernames.