RSS Feeds for the Web Developer

What’s RSS?

It’s simple: instead of having to visit the websites that interest you, you use software (an RSS feed reader or RSS news reader) to pull the latest information from those websites to you. The information is coded on those websites in RSS (which stands for "Real Simple Syndication"), but 99% of the time, the authors of the websites don’t even know that they’re generating RSS in addition to their posts. Instead, they simply write their content, & an RSS feed is generated behind the scenes. Interested users can then subscribe to the RSS feed & get those posts.

For more on RSS, watch the 4-minute YouTube video RSS in Plain English or read Wikipedia’s article on RSS.

Google Reader

How should you subscribe to RSS feeds? I recommend using Google Reader.

• It’s free.
• If you use Gmail or any other registered Google service, you already have a Google Reader account—you just don’t know it!
• It’s powerful.
• It’s web-based, so you can access your news feeds from any connected device.
• Almost every desktop or mobile RSS reader syncs with Google Reader.

To start using Google Reader, go to http://reader.google.com, sign in, & start adding RSS feeds. For more info about using Google Reader, watch the following videos:

• Getting Started with Google Reader
• Welcome to Google Reader!
• Reading Feeds with Google Reader
• Sharing Items with Google Reader
• Sharing any webpage with Google Reader

RSS feeds

I subscribe to all of these RSS feeds. I’m sure there’s something for every web developer here!

General web development

Smashing Magazine (site & RSS)
“Smashing Magazine delivers useful and innovative information to Web designers and developers. Our aim is to inform our readers about the latest trends and techniques in Web development.”

The Daily Nerd (site & RSS)
“On this site I regularly post small comments to a selection of links. These links are mostly about front-end development, a term I use broadly. I consider many techniques and disciplines to be part of front-end development.”

Mozilla Hacks (site & RSS)
“Mozilla Hacks is one of the key resources for people developing for the Open Web, talking about news and in-depth descriptions of technologies and features.”

456 Berea Street (site & RSS)
“This site is a place for me to post articles, tutorials, and comments on subjects that are interesting and useful to me and hopefully to other web professionals. Most posts on this site are related to web standards, accessibility, or usability in one way or another, with the occasional post on other subjects.”

Web browsers

The Chromium Blog (site & RSS)
News from the open source project that powers Google Chrome.

CSS

CSS-Tricks (site & RSS)
A community centered around CSS, including blog posts, videos, forums, demos, a gallery, & snippets of code for HTML, CSS, htaccess, PHP, JavaScript, jQuery, & WordPress.

HTML5

HTML5 Doctor (site & RSS)
“… a resource for people who wanted to learn more about the hows and whys of implementing HTML5.”

Typography

I Love Typography (site & RSS)
“This site aims to make [typography, type design, and lettering] more accessible, to bring the study of typography to the masses…”

Nice Web Type (site & RSS)
“Nice Web Type is one place for web typography, following experiments, advancements, and best practices in typesetting web text.”

Usability

Usability Geek (site & RSS)
“Through this blog I try to provide practical recommendations on how you can make your web site usable.”

UX Magazine (site & RSS)
“Our primary goal is to provide a steady stream of current, informative, and credible information about [user experience] and related fields to enhance the professional and creative lives of UX practitioners and those exploring the field.”

US News Feed (site & RSS)
“At UX News Feed you find the best articles about interaction design, information architecture, usability, visual design and the like from blogs and sites around.”

Little Big Details (site & RSS)
A visual blog that shows an image to illustrate a clever UI feature or solution.

Mobility

QuirksBlog (site & RSS)
“On his influential QuirksBlog Peter-Paul Koch follows the browser market, advances in front-end technology and theory, and related topics. Increasingly, he blogs about the mobile Web and its unique problems.”

LukeW (site & RSS)
“Publications on the critical details and big picture behind digital product design. LukeW's 11 years of writing cover Web and device strategy, interaction design, visual design, usability, and much more.” Although this site isn’t explicity focused on mobility, much of it is.

WordPress

Digging Into WordPress (site & RSS)
“DiggingIntoWordPress.com is the blog home for the upcoming book of the same name …”

WP Engineer (site & RSS)
“We always try to show ways to make WordPress a little bit better, more convenient, more flexible or in short - just awesome!”