The Technology Behind the MALT Experience

I wanted to quickly make a post that pointed to some of the tech tools I’m implementing to assist in workflow for MALT. I hope to update this over the year as necessary:

• WordPress – WordPress is the content management system (CMS) that runs this blog. The theme is Independent Publisher and I’m running a plugin called Shortcodes Ultimate which gives me a little more design flexibility.
• Reclaim Hosting – This is the hosting service I use. It was founded to make hosting cheap for educators. At $25 a year, it’s really hard to beat.
• RSS (via FeedWordPress plugin) – To keep up with other Cadremates blogs, I’ve setup a second instance of WordPress and installed a plugin called FeedWordPress. This pulls in all the sites that have public RSS or Atom feeds.
• Kindle App for iPad – Most of my non-reference books are bought on Amazon for the Kindle and are read on my iPad mini. This feels almost unnatural considering that the iPad hadn’t even been unveiled when I completed college.
• Goodreads – I use this as a repository for all the books we read as well as to record my reading progress.
• Dropbox – This is the cloud storage solution I use.
• Google Drive – Mainly used for  collaborative and shared documents.
• iMovie – This is my video editing software. Five years ago this would not have been my first choice but the program has REALLY came a long ways over time. You can now stack multiple layers in a timeline view which is all I really need.
• Adobe Creative Cloud – Most used apps are Photoshop, InDesign with a pinch of Illustrator and Dreamweaver.
• Steam – Video game “engine.”
• Canon t2i Camera Body – Mostly used the kit lens 18-55 3.5-5.6mm and a 50mm 1.8 lens.
• iPhone 5s – Used for quick and dirty photography/videography.
• MacBook Pro – 2012 Retina Model. 2.7 GHz Intel Core i7, 16 GB Ram, 500GB HD