About | Mark Ratledge .com

I’m a journalist and non-fiction writer in Montana; and I work as a WordPress developer for clients in Montana and around the world.

WordPress: Read more about my WordPress work and check my online technology profiles: WordPress.org; StackOverflow; WordPress Development; and Upwork. I work with WooCommerce, Genesis themes and Twig/Timber, Google tools, MemberPress and Event Espresso, CiviCRM and Advanced Custom Fields (ACF); I do Linux server administration, and use WP Engine, Linode, Liquid Web Pantheon; and I handle migrations to WordPress from other platforms, such as Joomla, ExpressionEngine, Drupal, phpBB, Hubspot, TypePad, Movable Type, Blogger, Wild Apricot, and from “plain” PHP & MySQL sites.

My articles include The Burial of Elouise Cobell in High Country News. My latest humor pieces at Slackjaw are Folk Music Police Blotter and QAnon Hires an Image Consultant, and at Medium Bird Reviews of your Lawn Sprinkler and Henry David Thoreau at Starbucks. I have a piece in McSweeney’s called Back in the Good Old Days, We Had Facts. An older piece on right wing militia types is Christian Kerodin’s Armed Citadel in Idaho and his Fantasy Novels. And I have a piece on the 2010 Blackfeet Bear River (Baker – Marias) Massacre Memorial in Montana. For ten years, I wrote pieces called State of the Arts Tech Talk for the Montana Arts Council. My 2008-2011 archived Missoulian columns include my 225-odd Sunday Tech columns and some InBusinessMonthly articles.

I’m active in the arts and humanities in Montana, and served as vice-chair of the Montana Cultural and Aesthetic Trust from 2006 to 2013. I’ve received grants from the Montana Arts Council, including an individual fellowship in Photography; from Humanities Montana for writing and research; from Ucross Foundation for a writer’s residency; and a Charles Redd Center for Western Studies Independent Scholar grant.

I engineered and produced a set of CDs titled Eat Stone and Go On: The Recorded Poetry of Richard Hugo, funded by Humanities Montana and individuals. The CDs were distributed free to public libraries and schools around the state of Montana.

I’m a faculty affiliate in the University of Montana-Missoula’s Department of English and have taught composition and introductory literature classes. I also taught an Introductory Information Technology class in the Department of Computer Science. I taught creative writing in the Wilderness and Civilization Program in the Department of Forestry at UM, and I’ve taught photography in high schools through the Montana Art Council.