Up until recent months, I'd been using FeedReader to keep track of my RSS feeds. While not completely terrible, it had enough annoyances for me to start looking at other readers. Enter Google Reader, which has so far been a relatively (searching/filter posts would be a very welcome feature) pleasant experience. Something that FeedReader used to do was a toaster pop-up with information about new or unread items, which is a reasonably useful feature as I'm not able to look at my feeds as often as I'd like to, so I wrote my own notifier.
I am aware that others exist, but they are either crap or a Firefox extension. As I don't always leave my browser open, I decided to make it a notification icon and I decided to code it in IronPython, as a little exercise and because it was the easiest. Simple enough to use, make sure you have (at least) IronPython 1.0 installed, run it with ipyw.exe grnotify.py (to avoid leaving a console window behind), set up the options and you're done. You can "install" it to your startup folder by running it with ipy.exe grnotify.py -install. The source is available in my darcs repo at http://slipgate.za.net/~korpse/darcs/grn.