It's very seldom that a blog design catches my eye.
Most common templates for blog systems like Wordpress or Serendipity are very well honed. Usability, accessibility and visual design of these systems and their default templates are are as good as it gets for the time being. Trying to do better usually fails. But Wordpress-CLI, which I found at Pete Hindle's blog manages to create a unique design. It may be inspired on the google shell (gosh) or older incarnations of the concept, e.g. WebCmd, but it is unique because it requires poking and trying stuff to expose the full functionality. A bit like an old school rogue-like game, it inspires playing with it to find out more. And it reminds nicely of command interfaces to BBS systems although the authors chose a syntax to resemble a unix based shell. You can try out different sub-designs at Rob McFarland's site. Obviously, usability still sucks, but it's worth it! Well done.
And Pete: Please write some interesting entries in that blog now 
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The Wikimedia Foundation has started its annual fundraiser again on November 4th 2008. It is scheduled to run until January 15th 2009. I've written several articles on last year's so I've been asked a lot to comment on the current one.
This year Wikimedia clearly state they want to raise $6 million. No more diffuse targets, "number of donors" weirdness as last year. Well done, Rand!
Rand Montoya is Wikimedia's new "Head of Community Giving" and responsible for making this fundraiser much more professional than last year's.
The contribution history page still is only good to spot the occasional clown donating JPY 1 (which makes Wikimedia loose money due to transaction fees). But Rand pointed me to two other pages giving a better report on current donations:
The meter banner on top of many wikipedia pages matches the data on these pages quite closely. It's just a million off . (see images above) That million is an annual donation by the Sloan foundation ($3 million over three years). All of it been accounted for in the donation year 2007 (see the Wikimedia Financials FAQ) but somehow it is added again in the meter but not in the statistics pages.
BTW: The German Wikimedia chapter has a less fancy, but more complete and transparent reporting of donations. Not cut-off after seven days. All of a month on one page. Data ready for copy & paste into a spreadsheet. Benchmark.
So, is the $6 million target realistic?
At day 29 of the 74 day campaign, $3.3m have been raised. Taking out the major donations totaling $1.7m (these are not stochastic enough to be estimated with any reasonable validity) and assuming that the Christmas tax rally at the end of the year roughly equals the start of fundraising spike, we can expect $2.6m to be raised from individual contributors. Adding back the major donations, the estimation for the total fundraiser comes in at $4.3m. That's plus any major donations still to be announced. I bet a guy with Rand's experience has another ace up his sleeve. One less elegant solution has been hinted at in the fundraiser FAQ already:
"What happens if you do not reach your goal? [...] A second, smaller fundraiser may be scheduled for March."
