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August 13, 2012
One Man & His Blog: rebooted
All change! This blog has a brand new look, and for those of you in RSS readers, here's a screengrab of it, with the explanation and thinking behind it afterwards:
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
- 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.
Some things haven't changed:
- 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 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. 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?
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