FeedBurner

Andy and I were talking about blog stuff a while back, and he told me I should check out FeedBurner.  Well, I checked it out this weekend, and it is absolutely killing my productivity.  There are a million options that you can customize to make your feed look just how you like.  I think I've blown at least three hours this weekend just playing with FeedBurner, and that doesn't include the time updating my blog layout and such to bring it up to par with my nifty new feed.

The coolest thing about it is that it is entirely extensible.  For a lot of the work I do, it is important that we can just get it installed and then extend it in place, so I find the model that FeedBurner uses particularly interesting.  The following is a FeedFlare that adds a "Twit This!" option to my feeds and posts (Thanks go to Eric Olsen over at FeedBurner for the example FeedFlare):    

The FeedFlare is just a simple XML document, but the FeedBurner API allows you to walk the DOM of each post and add value to the content.  By setting up a really simple way to integrate with the page, FeedBurner enables developers to tie into their own server-side code, and do all the heavy lifting there.