A Flurry of Featurettes

As though they were still on the road to Grandma Frances' house, stuck in the back bench seat between a bunch of bullying databases and a self-absorbed older web server, FeedBurner's feature set sometimes wants to cry out, "will you stop touching me!" Alas, we continue to fuss over our constantly evolving publisher-driven offering — it can always get better. We'll call this latest round of improvements "featurettes" since they are mostly enhancements to the existing services you know and seem to like. Here is the rundown:

PingShot, now even more Ping-tacular
Last Thursday, Google launched a ping server in support of their blog search, and our busy engineers wasted no time incorporating it into our PingShot notification service. For those of you who were napping during PingShot class, here's a quick refresher. If you want ensure that Google Blog Search is indexing your content in real-time, activate the free PingShot service with a few simple clicks.

A few more recently-added PingShot-able services include Blogblogs, a search engine and social media platform for Brazilian blogs which is getting a bit of buzz as well as FeedBlitz, the email service. To activate and customize PingShot to your liking, just log in, select your feed, go to the "Publicize" tab and click the "PingShot" link in the left column.

FeedBurner Email — attract more subscriptions (and look fabulous doing it)
Never again miss an opportunity to promote email subscription. If you're using FeedBurner Email + BrowserFriendly, you now have an additional option for subscription. Behold the shiny new link in our feed.

This new link-to-email functionality makes FeedBurner Email much more versatile. Add this link to your MySpace profile, your Wordpress.com blog or your email signature, etc. Promoting subscription to your feed is super simple with FeedBurner Email. Grab the code from the "Publicize" tab.

In other email-related news: formatting in Gmail involves some additional element-level style sheet poetry, so the design team held a CSS Slam and voila. Now, FeedBurner Email looks pretty when viewed in Gmail.

New and Improved FeedFlare
The catalog of developer-inspired FeedFlare from around the world continues to grow. There are static FeedFlares, dynamic FeedFlares and FeedFlares in foreign languages. Among the list of dynamic entrants (FeedFlares that reflect real-time information) are:

Check out the full catalog (yes, this page is overdue for a touchup). If you don't see a FeedFlare that suits your fancy, build your own.

So the road trip continues, whether the feature set likes it or not.