There are a lot of websites out there worth reading. Of course, checking all of them every day is a pain. Hence, we use syndication - a technique that allows users to grab headlines from our sites (in what we call a "news feed") and thus only visit when something new is posted.

As you can probably see, there is a news feed for this site available.

The news feed files themselves are rather tricky to read as unformatted XML. They come in several flavours, too, like Atom, RSS and RDF. In order to make your own life easier, you would do well, if you wish to keep track of your favourite sites using syndication, to use a News Feed Aggregator.

These nifty little programs check the news feed from your favourite sites every so often. If there are new posts, they display the headline, usually a brief description, and a link to the new stuff.

FeedDemon - $29.95

Nick Bradbury's FeedDemon is one of the most capable news feed readers available today, supporting RSS and Atom. Possibly its best feature is the NewsPaper, which amalgamates data from feeds into one easy-to-digest page.

BottomFeeder - Open Source

BottomFeeder can handle Atom and RSS feeds, and is available in just about every flavour imaginable, including Windows, Mac and Linux.

FeedReader - Open Source

FeedReader is fast and lightweight, however only supports RSS formats supports both Atom and RSS formats and is only available on Windows.

RSS Bandit - Open Source

RSS Bandit supports RSS and runs on Windows, but is prettier than FeedReader.

(By the way, if you want to recommend any other aggregators, please do leave a comment afterwards.)

Finally, more and more applications are adding in news feed support. Trillian and Opera have in-built support. Firefox, Thunderbird and plenty of other applications have addons for news feeds. In short, however you currently use the web, you should find it quick and easy to keep uo to date with the sites you read regularly using news feeds.

Sites to Subscribe to

Here is a small selection of the various web-design related sites whose news feeds I subscribe to. Not all will necessarily be your cup of tea - but hopefully you will find a couple of gems in here you had not seen before.

Note: Feeds are available in RSS and Atom form for AddedBytes.com. A more recent and better maintained list of blogs I subscribe to is also available.

Please Note. The list that was previously here has been removed as it was badly out of date. Please view my blogroll if you are interested in seeing which sites I subscribe to.

Last but by no means least

Ben Hammersley just released an amazing little validation tool. Simply add your URL to the end of this one:

1. http://www.benhammersley.com/tools/validate.cgi?url=

like so:

1. http://www.benhammersley.com/tools/validate.cgi?url=http://www.addedbytes.com/

And then add that combined URL to your news feed reader. It will report validation errors in RSS form. Be nice to Ben though - only check it once a week or so, at most! Otherwise you'll cripple the poor guy's bandwidth. More details available in XHTML Validator to RSS.