Here’s a great project in progress from the Adafruit community. “Pete.M” is looking to create a “universal” AVR ISP shield, as described in the Adafruit Forums:

I ended up using extra-long header pins for the shield mount, and added a row of header pins along each side of the ZIFF socket. I can use female-to-female jumpers to map any Arduino pin to any pin on the socket.

I put some pics on Flickr and added them to the Adafruit pool.

I’ll post results after programming a few different chips.

Read more.