Plaidcasts & new wine website

Its been like 3 weeks since I've posted! Whoops!

So what have I been working on?
I've edited 4 podcasts:
Burka Ban Signifies Shift in Europe
Taiwan’s Tricky Sticky Status
Sino Sniping Has International Impacts
Iran: the State Built on Hate

And now Vimeo has a mobile site where you can view our Plaidcasts on the iPhone/iPod Touch. To make sure our videos can been seen I have to encode them with the H.264 codec which takes longer than the one I was using (3ivx). Also, I've been exporting them in HD now as well! Exciting!
We need to start linking to the videos on plaidavenger.com since they can't be embedded as of yet, so you have to watch them on Vimeo.
Check the videos out if you are on an iPhone/iPod Touch:
Burka Ban Signifies Shift in Europe
Taiwan’s Tricky Sticky Status
Sino Sniping Has International Impacts
Iran: the State Built on Hate

So the other big thing I've been working on is creating a wine website for John Boyer and his geography of wine class. Boyerwine.com

First I just started out by creating one on Wordpress.com because I wanted it to have multiple pages, something you can't do on Blogger.com (that I know of). We wanted to website to have a page (blog) for 2 wines of the week for students. When I work on Sunday at the Vintage Cellar, Trent will pick out 2 wines for the class which they will get 10% off of for the week. Then we also wanted lesson pages to incorporate John's Drink this Now! book and Gary V's Wine Library TV tasting episodes he does. We matched up chapters from John's book to episodes on Wine Library TV and then had what to taste along side. Finally we wanted to have a resource for where to drink in Blacksburg and eventually the surrounding area. Many restaurants don't update or post their wine lists or even have a website! So we are slowly going around and getting the lists/prices and posting them on the site.

After a week or so on Wordpress.com I thought we should just go ahead and buy/host Boyerwine.com. I went through Bluehost and for a good deal the registered the site and now host it. I installed the Wordpress software, copied everything over, and then redesigned it since I know have a wide range of themes to choose from. I went with the Atahualpa them from Bytes for All. They have a great interface to adjust many aspects of the site for those who don't know CSS, aka me! So after spending a day playing with the settings to get it acceptable (still more tweaking to do), we have now switched over to the site and are using it for class.

John wants to start posting informational wine videos as well, like how to open a sparkling wine bottle, or how to taste wine. There are many of those on YouTube but they lack John's exciting personality, lol.

We went to a warehouse tasting yesterday in Winchester, VA for Kysela and took some video of the place and talked to a few wine makers and I hope to have that posted soon.