Welcome to the Chris Reed Tech Blog

Welcome to the Chris Reed Tech blog. Thanks for checking it out!

It’s 2014 and this is my first blog–so we’ll see how this goes. I wanted to use the first post to outline some of my goals for the blog. It will evolve over time but by setting some expectations maybe I will be more likely to post more often about issues and topics that matter to me as I’m working through them on particular projects.

What about this blog

I’ve been working on various WordPress projects for friends and clients for the past several years and I’ve been my friend’s and family’s token Apple fanboy since I worked at the Apple Store while I was in college in 2006. So I wanted a wanted to make my own site for a few reasons:

I wanted a WordPress site so I could try new themes, plugins, tools, workflows, and of course custom code even if I’m not actively working on a client project at the moment.
I wanted place where I write about WordPress tools, workflows, and tips and share them with the community. Also so I can remember them.
I wanted to be able to write about cool iOS and Mac apps and link to interesting Apple news.
I wanted to write a plugin to create a link blog using WordPress. Because that’s what all the cool Apple bloggers do.

The site is built on WordPress using the Genesis Framework along with a few other plugins (some of which are listed here) and some custom PHP and CSS where needed. If a blog entry is a link post, the post title in the feed and on the site will appear with an arrow “→” next to the title text and the title link will take you straight to the linked post. To get the link directly to the post on my site there will be a permalink link right below the post title as well. I got this functionality working with a custom plugin and I’ll eventually publish the instructions in a post here. I usually write the posts in markdown using the Jetpack markdown module to convert the markdown in the post editor to HTML.