My first customization to the WordPress Engine was a success. So far I am very happy with the flexibility that the engine gives you. Essentially I wrote a wrapper to the lastRSS class (not part of wordpress), that would take a count. This wrapper stores the feed you want, and will return a Title/Link anchor for the “x” most recent posts to the feed. Where x is a parameter that you pass into the function. I choose my digg.com feed. So everyone that is interested in watching what I am reading there you go.
My next addition will hopefully be AdSense. I am still waiting to hear back from google as to whether I am approved. Keep your fingers crossed.