Garrett redesigns Maniacal Rage and I’m rather taken. I’m very pleased with some aspects of this design… but something’s just not right. I think I’d like things a bit bigger, and with more space to breathe; it almost seems too cramped. This site’s gone into an inspiration folder, though; I like the comments layout, and the two-tone look. (I also quite like Garrett’s writing, even though it’s been thin on the ground recently, which always helps).

Nothing new today, sorry – I’ve got a few posts in the cupboard but have been busy hacking together My First WordPress Plugin. Don’t get excited. It really is no great shakes, just provides a handy template function that should have been there anyway, but I’m quite pleased I’ve managed to stick to someone else’s standards and write something oh-so-tidy. I’m about halfway through documenting it and preparing all the publicity material. Watch this space…

When I redesigned this site, I got so fed up after fourteen days of wrangling with XHTML, CSS, and WordPress that I just kept the comments design from my old MT site – it was grayscale, it didn’t clash, it did. But it wasn’t quite what I intended. I’ve now updated how comments are listed, so you might need to refresh your stylesheet if individual pages look weird. And yes, I coded it by hand myself; it may look like other products on the market, but I stole not a sausage. Besides, I’m thinking of redesigning the whole shebang anyhow.

Update: well, it doesn’t quite look right in IE6 (negative margin not handled properly) but it looks functional, so I’ll leave it at that for now. Remember to refresh that stylesheet!

Full transcript of David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech at Kenyon. It’s very good, and balances the celebration of education completed (and ongoing) with filling graduates with perhaps not terror, but certainly trepidation.

Hallelujah – at last, some decent notes on Javascript courtsey of Peter-Paul Koch at Quirksmode. Will peruse when I have a moment or two.

Linda Stone on Attention at Supernova 2005; practically transcribed over at the O’Reilly Radar.

A day early, too. Broadband reconnected in my house – and the wireless even stretches to the study. Superb. One less thing to have to worry about.

Just launched last week: the New Statesman/Pfizer Policy Forum on Health. Not the normal sort of thing I’d link on Infovore, but the design and build (as well as a fair bit of the PHP development) was carried out by my good self. Very pleased with it, all-told – especially the “white-grid” and quite how tidy the markup is. Yes, I know it’s not valid XHTML Transitional. I blame legacy CMSes and unencoded ampersands.

The XGameStation Micro – a homebrew games console for learning hardware development on. Graphics are similar to an Atari 2600; the processor is more powerful; it takes standard nine-pin joysticks and comes with documentation and emulators for development. Really nifty – not sure I could spend that much given limited programming skills, but it’s a fantastic idea: giving developers a limited (but functional) platform that harks back to old 8-bit systems. I’ll be keeping an eye on their upcoming projects.

Marco from BB5 is Digital Spy’s Big Brother columnist. This, his first column, is surprisingly insightful… enough so to make me keep reading. Whether I keep watching the show is another matter. It is still curiously compulsive, I will own…