I have a suggestion for an update to http://arduino.cc/en/Main/Standalone .
Near the bottom, they have a series of instructions for adding an AVR ISP socket to a breadboard. Their mechanism for doing so was a board from SparkFun.
I was faced with a need to ISP a bare ATTiny chip not too long ago and needed to improvise on the fly. I had (still have) a Pocket AVR programmer from SparkFun, and the easiest way I found to solve the problem is DIP IDC connectors. An example is here: http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/CWR-130-14-0000/CDP14G-ND/9899 .
Crimp a 10 line ribbon cable into that (yeah, it's a 14 pin socket. Just waste 4 pins). Crimp the other end to a (normal) 10 pin IDC socket (example: http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/XG4M-1030/OR908-ND/1829390 ). That end of the cable will plug directly into the AVR programmer, and the other end can plug directly into the breadboard, spanning the center channel just like an IC.
One gotcha is that, at least the IDC DIP connector I got, pin 1 is on the right side. Apart from that, there were no other surprises. Odd pins are on the right, and running down are MOSI, nc, /RESET, SCK, MISO. The top left pin is Vcc, and then the rest on the left are GND.