If past experience is anything to go by, the entire site will break horribly, at least once.

Update: it seems that my old template was so riddled with elderly WordPress code that the new version point blank refuses to use it. This theme will have to do until I summon the energy to redesign the site.

Update II: Huh, I seem to have fixed everything. Which is almost a shame, as I quite fancied flexing my puny HTML and CSS muscles on a new design.

Update III: Instead, I’ll be flexing my puny metadata entry muscles: Submit Response now has tags. Well, eight posts do. Only 1,242 to go! Don’t worry, I won’t be entering them all manually, thanks to the rather clever Simple Tags plugin.

Update IV: You can now use OpenID to leave comments on the site.

Diamond is a quirky little app that, roughly speaking, works like a cross between Stickies and ‘distraction free’ editors like Write Room (which I gushed about a year ago), blocking out your desktop, other applications and the Menu Bar.

The most unconventional feature is the one I like the best: as you can see in the screenshot above, text is automatically broken up into columns, and so you scroll horizontally through a document, not vertically. Writing a review this morning, I used a near-fullscreen Diamond window, and found that having what you might call a holistic view of the piece helpful—re-ordering paragraphs was easier, repeated words leapt out, and proof-reading generally felt a lot quicker. It also has the only feature I really need in a text editor, a running word count, which floats unobtrusively at the bottom of the editing window.

Sure, there’s a certain lack of polish—you have to relaunch after changing a preference setting, for example—but Diamond is well worth checking out. It’s simple to use, customisable to suit your needs, and, best of all, lets you concentrate on writing without distractions.

Hyundai logo

Daniel Libeskind’s Gazprom building

As “design” continues to seep into every crevice of our culture, counterfeit goods also offer a level of authentic undesign that legal corporations are practically incapable of producing. The off the books and in the shadows production style might be focused upon replicating name brands, but it also generates an environment ideally suited for the art of the machine and the art of the accident to thrive. The counterfeit good is all about “brand”, but it also lives free of a brand manager. It’s all about design too, yet it is made without any concern to the designers intent. And in this freedom mistakes thrive beautifully.