At last I've managed to get an Explore blogs site up and running. Still a bit raw but it gives us an excellent platform to use for the podcasts being produced - usually about our tours, and generally very interesting. I enjoyed listening to the little snippets from Bernice Davison on Belarus and Ukraine here.
Apparently snow is quite romantic - I guess only if you're in warm clothes :)
Anyway - I really enjoyed putting it together as I refreshed my Wordpress skills, and found some great plugins for the platform including the very good podpress, Breadcrumb navigation XT (which I ended up hacking!), Jerome's Keywords and the simple but just what I needed Author Profile Picture.
Thanks to all those guys for their hard work - its much appreciated.
On a similar note of learning new stuff I noticed that Ton has been learning all about Drupal, something I had considered for this site (and learning seriously) when I was looking to launch my consultancy full time. Good luck with that - I found it was too much to take on board quickly and so I've deliberately left it alone - however I'll keep an eye on what Ton gets uop to to see whether its worth it!