One Man & His Blog: rebooted

Today is nominally my first day back off paternity leave – as far as the self-employed can ever have paternity leave. How do I decide to celebrate? By completely revamping the look and feel of this blog. Back in the early days of *One Man & His Blog*, its theme changed every few months. But some time around 2006, it ossified into the design it’s had ever since. I’ve been dissatisfied with it for at least a year, and the time has finally come to bring it into a more modern form.

I wanted to achieve a number of things:

- Radically simplify the design – all that multi-sidebar stuff is *so* mid-2000s.  - Clear away a lot of the links to pages that are rarely visited – category archives, for example.  - Experiment with better web typography through [Typekit](https://typekit.com) - Give images – always a bit part of this blog – more room to breathe on the page - Give a much clearer focus on the content – and give comments more prominence - Create something that would work particularly well on mobiles and tablets. 

- Taupy the reptile is still the blog’s mascot, but in much reduced form. It’s a touch of continuity with the old design. - It’s still [Movable Type](http://www.movabletype.com/ "Movable Type") under here. Maybe one day I’ll make the move to WordPress, but it doesn’t feel necessary right now.  - It’s still being heavily cached and minified and CDNed through [CloudFlare](https://www.cloudflare.com/). The page load times were pretty good under the old design – hopefully I’ve driven them even lower with the new look.

This design isn’t complete – I’m trying to get myself back into the mindset of the blog being in perpetual beta, so expect to see tweaks, changes and alterations for the foreseeable future. For now though – what do you think?