Subscribable Validation

Ben Hammersley has just built something brilliant. There’s been lots of talk lately about validation. It’s hard. Maintaining validation is harder.
To make things easier on yourself, check out Ben’s fantastic XHTML Validator to RSS widget. Append a URL to the script, and subscribe to it using your favorite newsreader. Woilla! An RSS feed for validation errors. Updated whenever you’d like of course. You don’t even need to think about checking for validation errors manually anymore.
This is instantly useful. Bravo, Ben.

12 Comments

  1. Jeremy Flint says:
    Jul 2, 2004

    Works great in feed demon.
    Thought I would point out that you have to actually point it to a file. When i tried just pointing to a domain name (jeremyflint.com), it would not return anything, but when i added a filename (index.php), it worked.
    Thanks for the tip Dan.

  2. Kevin says:
    Jul 2, 2004

    That is a brilliant, innovative use of RSS. Much easier than setting up a cron job or some other such nonsense. This could be useful for other scripts I want to schedule to run regularly on my sites… ohhh, Ben and Dan get bonus points for this idea…

  3. Dan Cederholm says:
    Jul 2, 2004

    The credit entirely goes to Ben. I’m just merely reporting on it. ;-)

  4. Kevin says:
    Jul 2, 2004

    Perhaps I was over-excited, I’ll be a little more careful throwing around those bonus points next time.

  5. Scott says:
    Jul 2, 2004

    That is pretty cool, Although my site isn’t even valid yet :p

  6. Jared Christensen says:
    Jul 2, 2004

    This is a bit off topic but I just found this great web based news reader bloglines. It is really worth taking a look at. You can keep up on all of your news now no matter what computer you are on. How many of you already use this?

  7. compuwhiz7 says:
    Jul 2, 2004

    Jared: I use Bloglines for when I’m traveling.
    Dan/Ben: Brilliant. (I know that you didn’t write it, Dan, but you reported it.) I can’t wait to use this.

  8. Katie Dixon says:
    Jul 2, 2004

    Great post Dan, thanks for the link!

  9. DH says:
    Jul 5, 2004

    Oh no. A permanent, updating, always there reminder that my site is not yet valid. As if I wasn’t feeling inadequate enough already!
    Thanks though – everything a great tool should be: brilliantly simple, immediately obvious now we have it, and instantly essential. Congrats Ben.

  10. Cameron says:
    Jul 5, 2004

    Thanks for bringing this to our attention Dan, and thanks to Ben for sharing an incredibly useful idea

  11. Remi Prevost says:
    Jul 5, 2004

    Thanks for telling us about that useful tool! :-)

  12. Anonymous says:
    Jul 7, 2004

    Its Voila, not woilla!