Being involved in lifestyle marketing really has its perks. When GrapeThinking was in its infancy, and the only client was Tastevine.com, it was really easy to mix business and pleasure. As a group of Millennials passionate about promoting things that bring people together, we didn’t find it too demanding to travel to major cities and throw parties promoting particular wines, and of course, the Tastevine wine community.

As the “tech” guy, my traveling is not quite as adventurous as say Ruarri’s travels to Morroco, or Meghan’s trip Paris, but I do get a chance here and there, and I always try to make the best of it. Apparently, I’m starting a tradition of going to a concert/music festival to complement my business trips. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I replaced the hard drive in one of my laptops. Everything was under warranty, so no problems there. Now that I have a brand spanking new hard-drive I figured I would take advantage of its innocence, and partition off a section for the anticipated release of Ubuntu 8.04 … aka Hardy Heron.

What a great call. Of course, I went ahead and installed the OEM Vista on a 60 gig partition, simple to do using the recovery disks provided by Toshiba. For the record, it is very important that you install the Microsoft Windows OS first if you plan on dual booting with Linux, so you can rewrite the micro$oft boot manager with the more friendly Linux boot manager. Basically, you aren’t under time constraints to choose which OS you want to boot at startup.

Today, I fidgeted with excitement as I booted up my clean Vista install, and as a first task on this windows machine, immediately browsed to Ubuntu.com to download Hardy Heron. Read the rest of this entry »

Just a quick note to all of our readers… I received an email a few minutes ago that Dotster will be giving away 500 domain names tomorrow at 1 PM Pacific to the first ones to click a banner on their site. Being the domain name tech-junkie I am, this of course excites me as I have several I’ve been thinking about. I figured passing this information along would be good for karma’s sake (e.g. In hopes I’m not the 501st person to click on the banner). Below is the content from the newsletter:

To stay in the spirit of Happy Hour, I will be tasting several Tempranillo blends for a client who will soon be releasing a new wine brand. Free wine is AWESOME! Once they get the juice right, we’re going to send out some free samples, so if your interested, contact us

EDIT: We’ve started receiving quite a bit of traffic on this post… To those of you coming from reddit.com, welcome, and Thank You for visiting. I just realized we do not have a link up, so I went and created a CJ Affiliate account for one -> Dotster.com.

I was browsing through some old notes, and found this post by Ryan Opaz at Catavino talking about their site stats, and figuring out the reality behind pageviews in the wine industry. The post had spawned a great discussion, and in preparing a response, I decided should just write a post about site stats.

Are you tracking visitors to your website? If the answer is NO, then you have to catch up with the times. If you owned a hardware store, and I could tell you information about:

• who your customers are
• how many customers you have
• how they find you
• how long each of them are in your store
• what they are looking at
• how long someone is in a particular section
• is this their first visit
• what they bought
• at what point did they decide to leave

Would you not practically beg me for this? Read the rest of this entry »

I received this Press Release in the inbox a few minutes ago, and thought we could share. We had several conversations with Chris at ZanMedia a while back concerning this film, and really like the direction it is headed in promoting the wine industry. Just a helpful tip to anyone marketing movies… It is ALWAYS a good idea to put your trailer on youtube. (I would have embedded it into this page for our readers if I could have found this one)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

For More Information contact:
Niki Scioli, Associate Producer
Zan Media
(415-897-8393)

The University of Rochester Medical Center yesterday, released research information concluding that the antioxidants in red wine not only enhance the effectiveness of radiation and chemotherapy treatment, but also appear to kill cancer cells. Read the rest of this entry »

So you are ready to start advertising on Facebook?… Great! This simple tutorial should help you to get your ad set-up in less than 15 minutes.

Step 1 - What are you promoting? - Login to Facebook, then go to the Create Ad page and enter the url you want your traffic to go to. (For our clients, we customize a landing page for each ad in an effort to better convert the traffic). Read the rest of this entry »

Wow… so I wrote a post on my struggles getting Rails to work on my Windows Machine, and then I figure it out. I’ve been developing in various languages, and using Xampp to for my server, database, and programming language (Apache, MySQL, PHP). Nevertheless, I have finally got it working, and it was a lot simpler than I had figured. In case you’ve come here and you’re yet to get Xampp… I’ll walk you through the whole process. If you already have it, then go ahead and skip to STEP 2

STEP 1 - Install Xampp - ApacheFriends has made it really easy by giving us a simple windows installer to download. If your interested in developing with Perl, Tomcat, you can download their Add-Ons by clicking the links. Once you download, just give it a click and follow the on-screen instructions. I recommend you install Xampp at the default c:\xampp (if you do not, remember to replace the code below with your installation directory). Here’s a video to show you how simple it is…don’t be fooled, it takes a little longer than the video shows.

STEP 2 - Install Ruby - Thanks to RubyForge, you can download an easy one-click Ruby installer to use here. Once you download, click to open, and follow the instructions. I recommend you install Ruby at c:\xampp\ruby so it falls in line with your other programming languages, etc…

STEP 3 - Install Rails - Fortunately, the Windows version of Ruby comes with RubyGems already set up. Open your Command Prompt (start-> run-> cmd -OR- start-> programs-> accessories -> command prompt) and type the following commands.

Do the gem update from the bin directory in rails. For my installation:

cd c:\ruby\bin
gem update
You may be prompted several times to choose which gem. Pick the highest version for (mswin32)
gem install rails --include-dependencies

There may be some delays, and the install could take a while. If you encounter an error trying to use the gem command, just restart the Command Prompt.

STEP 4 - Create a Rails App - While your still in Command Prompt, type the following Command (without the brackets, and change “your-app-name” to whatever you wish to call your application)

rails C:/xampp/htdocs/<your-app-name>

STEP 5 - Configure Apache - With your Xampp installation, http://localhost (localhost:80) defaults to the Xampp browser control panel, which displays your status, tests, etc.. We want to be able to use Ruby, without disrupting this service, or interfering with our standard Xampp settings. Open your Xampp directory (in our case C:\Xampp) and browse to Apache\conf\httpd.conf and open the httpd.conf file in a text editor or other text editor of your choice.

Scroll all the way to the bottom, and add the following:

Listen 3000
LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so
#################################
# RUBY SETUP
#################################
<virtualHost *:3000>
ServerName rails
DocumentRoot "c:/xampp/htdocs/<your-app-name>/public"
<Directory "c:/xampp/htdocs/<your-app-name>/public/">

Options ExecCGI FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride all
Allow from all
Order allow,deny
AddHandler cgi-script .cgi
AddHandler fastcgi-script .fcgi

</Directory>
</VirtualHost>
#################################
# RUBY SETUP
#################################

Finally - Check it Out - Point your browser to http://localhost:3000 and you should see the “Welcome Aboard” from ROR.

If your also looking for some editors. A nice simple free PHP editor with great extensions is “PSPad“. For hardcore coding, I recommend Zend(free for 30 days). For a nice simple free Rails Editor, “RoRED“, something a little more intense I would say go with the free “NetBeans” (don’t forget the .jdk).

This post follows a 14 hour struggle to get Rails going on my Windoze Vista and my Windoze XP machine. I’ve been doing PHP development for a little while now, and have been using Xampp on both of my machines to create a local server for web-development. Recently we made a decision to build one of our in-house sites with Ruby on Rails, to take advantage of its agile nature, plugin modules, and overall speed of development. Boy was I in for a surprise.

Apparently, you cannot install Instant Rails, unless you want to try to figure out how to merge your 2 instances of Apache, and MySQL that are now running. In my hours of hunting, I could not come across a Rails plugin for Xampp. I tried to do a stand-alone rails install, and manually configure it, but then I could not use localhost for anything other than Ruby. This whole time, all I can think is that if I only had a Mac… but wait, I have an idea.

I’m a big fan of Windows Virtual PC 2007, so why not try to just set-up a Virtual Linux instance, and . Plus, once I get it set up, I can copy the Virtual PC hard-drive, and pass it around the office to everyone having the same problem I am.. BRILLIANT. For the record, I am writing this as I do it, so if I encounter FAIL, I’ll retitle, and post this in hopes someone can help.

Step 1 - Install Virtual PC 2007. This is one of the few free things that Microsoft offers, so I highly recommend you take advantage of it. You will find it to be quite versatile… I like the idea of running everything in a virtual PC, so if I need to buy a new computer, I don’t loose all my software and settings.. I just copy the Virtual Hard Drive, and BAM!, I’m ready to go. I also spec’d a lightweight machine, and copied it over to a thumb drive with a copy of the Virtual PC install file.. now I can load my personal PC on any windows machine.

Step 2 - Download Ubuntu 7.04 and Create a Virtual Machine. I am using a desktop version of Feisty Fawn, and can vouch that what I lay out here will work for this version only. To keep focus, I’m going to point you to Mike Kolitz for a detailed tutorial to install on Virtual PC. For some reason, some unanswered “issues” are not referenced though, and the answers are spread out, so if you encounter problems with video resolution, sound, networking (first click network, then wired), mouse, or system time < — check out the links. Please note - the install process takes about an hour, so try going for a jog, or pancakes..or both!

I edited the settings for my Virtual Machine to enable an “undo” function for the virtual drive. This way I could play with some of these “fixes” without worry of putting myself back to zero. When I make a system configuration change and it is successful, I go to the action menu, select close, and then select save state save changes (so I don’t have to wait on a reboot).

(Optional) Do a quick check for updates by going to terminal and typing (without quotes) “sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade”. This will probably take a little while, so go grab a bottle of wine or a few beers and start drinking!

Step 3 - Install LAMP - Thanks to Joe Raad for the wonderful walk-through. If you follow his instructions, you’ll have no problem, and you get the benefit of installing through apt-get vs. some package, which is one of many AWESOME Linux functions. Unlike Windows, Linux uses the apt-get function to update not only your OS, but also all of the programs.. pretty sweet! We’ll try it out once we wrap up the Ruby install.

Step 4 - Install Ruby on Rails -

-Start with Ruby using apt-get


~$ sudo apt-get install apt-get install ruby rdoc irb libyaml-ruby libzlib-ruby ri libopenssl-ruby ruby1.8-dev build-essential

-Install Gems from source (we are not using apt-get here because Gems updates itself and Rails, and we don’t want to confuse apt-get

~$ wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/34638/rubygems-1.1.0.tgz
~$ tar -xvzf rubygems-1.1.0.tgz
~$ rm rubygems-1.1.0.tgz
~$ cd rubygems-1.1.0
~$ sudo ruby setup.rb

-Allow Ruby Gems to update itself (and make sure gem installed properly)

~$ sudo gem update --system

If you get a gem: command not found error.. create a symbolic link by executing this:

~$ sudo ln -s /usr/bin/gem1.8 /usr/bin/gem

-Now, we install Rails using Ruby Gems

~$ sudo gem install rails
~$ PATH=${PATH}:/var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/
~$ export PATH

-Add the Driver for MySQL


~$ sudo apt-get install libmysql-ruby

Alright, now that the grunt work is over, you can start building some applications. Have fun!

(EDIT: I finally got it working on Windows - check it out)

What do you do if you want to show your ads to single females between the ages of 22 and 26, who are interested in Jack Johnson, traveling, and enjoy the hit TV series “Lost”. - Answer - Facebook Advertising

You can only narrow your targeted advertising down so far when using some of the traditional online advertising strategies. Google Adwords allows you to target specific keywords (a proven method), and they will use IP addresses to geo-target your ads to people in specific areas. You can roughly determine the demographics of a particular website for your CPM (cost-per-impression) advertising based on content..e.g. the most frequent visitors of dating sites are single males between 30 and 45 years of age, and they are interested in …

Like many advertising services, Facebook offers you the option to pay on a CPC (cost-per-click) basis, which means exactly that. You only pay when someone clicks on the ad. You can also choose the CPM method, which can save you money and offer more overall exposure for your $. They launched the program in November, and have received both positive and negative criticisms. Read the rest of this entry »

After our recent post highlighting a recent duplicate content issue we faced, we decided it would be a good time to start giving out free advice for building your web rankings.

One of our most commonly requested services is web site optimization. Unfortunately (and fortunately) web developers are just now starting to implement a better practice of building sites to be search engine friendly. As web development continues to be outsourced, many developers just don’t feel like putting in that little bit of extra effort that truly does go a long way.

You may be familiar with some of the following issues, as I’m trying to keep this list simple, but hopefully there are a few gems that may help you on your way to the top. If you have any questions, don’t be shy to comment and we’ll help in every way we can. Read the rest of this entry »