allenc.com began back in 2011. I wanted an online presence, partially to augment my resume at the time, but also as an outlet to write down stray ideas and shape them into coherence. Its current name, in|retrospect, describes the broad introspective view that I employ in most of my writing here.
Theme Designs
I iterate on the design of this blog quite often, tweaking the structure and the layout every so often. These are what the previous versions have looked like through the years:
The current theme would be v8 in the evolution of the blog.
Initially, I built each theme from scratch. But eventually, the number of sections plus the complexity of layouts across mobile and desktop became overwhelming and I ended up customizing professional themes instead. Some of those that you see above are:
This current design is a lightly-customized variation of Thoughts by Priority Vision. The primary fonts for this theme are Geist and Manrope.
Writing
Most of my ideation, writing and editing is done in Markdown editor Typora:
Every written word on this blog is my own, but I do use AI to help in the course of authorship. My main tools are ChatGPT and Claude: they aid in domain research, early drafts, and grammar checks. The goal is to adhere to the Not by AI usage standard.
The featured images that accompany each post are sourced from either my own photo collection, the stock image repo Unsplash, and AI-generated with Google's creative suite Flow.
Technical Bits
This site is powered by Ghost, an open source web framework focused on writing. In the course of building this site, I've come to appreciate Ghost's simplicity and developer-friendliness; they keep a rich set of tools on Github to support casual development and site maintenance. In particular, I've made extensive use of their migration and CLI helpers for content management.
in|retrospect is currently hosted by Synaps Media:
Synaps Media
Previously, I ran my blog on Wordpress, and enjoyed great service on Cloudways.
Iconography for all the tags comes courtesy of Phosphor icons:
Tobias Fried
The sidenotes implementation is credited to jQuery.sidenotes, an old jQuery plugin that shifts Markdown-formatted footnotes into sidenotes with <aside> elements. I updated the plugin by rewriting it as a standalone JavaScript module, SidenotesJS:
allenmhc
