There are new technologies and new software programs coming out every day, a lot of them fall by the wayside admittedly, but you have to, at least, know what they are and what they do. The best way to keep your finger on the pulse of Web design is to subscribe to a Web design mailing list. A mailing list is a forum of people with similar interests to your own. You can send an email to the list with a tricky technical question or request a review of some site you are working on to see if you have made any blunders or to find out what happens to your pages on a vast variety of browsers and platforms. Or, you can just 'lurk' and read what other people are discussing, and learn from that.
Some lists are very active and send out a hundred emails every day.
That deluge of email might sound intimidating but you can usually tell from the subject line if there is a topic of particular interest to you and just ignore all the rest. Some people prefer to receive a 'digest', which is a single email containing multiple messages, but I find it easier to scan the subjects of individual emails than to wade through a digest. Although you will pick up a lot of knowledge from 'lurking', you will learn much more from active participation. The big advantage of a mailing list is that you can 'ask', and the chances are that you will have one, or more, answers within the hour - I've done it myself countless times. This is one of the original Web design lists originally started by Lynda Weinman about five years ago and later continued by her brother Bill.