With any luck, this will be the first new post of my brand new site. Time and past time, I know. The old website went up 13 years ago. It was the kind of thing one had to lick clean w’ tongue code by hand, definitely uphill both ways a pain in arse, which is why I made Ask Nicola over on Blogger. I’d meant that to be a temporary solution until I built a new website. But somehow I never got around to it. Then late last year I decided: it’s time. I was going to labour over this until it was perfect but it came together really fast, and looked so sleek, I thought: anything is better than the old one! So here it is, still under construction. You will see changes over the next wee while; don’t be alarmed! Meanwhile, please point your feed readers, bookmarks etc to:
https://nicolagriffith.com/blog/
Soon I will discontinue Ask Nicola. It’s served me well.
Meanwhile, for those who are curious about this sort of thing, the new nicolagriffith.com is built on the Studio theme, customised by a friend, and hosted by WordPress. (I can’t be doing with constant updating of things; this way, it’s all done for me. All I have to do is update the information I want you to see.) All photos of me are by Jennifer Durham.
Questions? Comments? Leave them below…
Nicola Griffith 
Comments should go up immediately. No moderation And I’m telling you something you already know because, hey, I’m testing, testing…
Congrats on your new site. It’s good and it’s bad. Good because it has clean layout, wondeful photography and easy on the eyes colours. Bad because it reminds me of how much I need to do on my clunky & horrible site. Sigh.
Suggestions:
– I’m close to legally blind & found the nav menu on the left side a little hard to make out with the text being over your pic.
– A lot of people say to put the social media links in the upper left corner, where people start scanning but I find it breaks up the flow & usually put them on the upper right and bottom. With the default resolution I use, they’re off the bottom of the page.
Rob
Re: social media links, do you mean on blog posts? They’re meant to be at the bottom.
I take your point about the sidebar nav links. You can also navigate using the big blocks, though I need to make the rollover text bigger and easier to read…
Many thanks for the input.
Congrats on the new site. It looks beautiful.
I thought it was easier to put up a screenshot than explain the point about the social media here so – http://luckdancing.com/live/?q=content/nicolas-new-site
ejensen, Thank you.
Rob, I see what you mean. My eyes always go top right for search, menu, social media etc. Just didn’t work with this theme! But, as I say, tweakage ahead…
Congrats on the new web site! I like the looks of it.
I primarily read your blog through the RSS feed aggregated on Dreamwidth. In looking for the new feed URL, I noticed that, currently, the RSS feed for your new blog only contains about the first ten words of each entry and a link to your site. (That’s the WordPress default behavior, I think.) Could you change that setting so that the complete entry is included in the RSS feed, the way that it was on the old site? It makes keeping up a lot easier, since one doesn’t have to click over to the post to read it.
Russ, I’ll see what I can do…
Thanks Nicola, the new colour is much easier for me. Happy tweaking :-)
To change the RSS, go to Settings > Reading in the admin and scroll to “For each article in a feed, show” and choose ‘full text.’ Scroll to the bottom and click ‘Save Settings’.
I can’t tell you how thrilled I am for you. The site is lovely and a joy to read. Hope you’re enjoying it!
Kronda, yep, I did that from the start, so I’m a bit puzzled. But hey, it’s all a learning experience…
Not sure if I looked at the wrong thing originally or if you fixed something, but the RSS feed is now working great (and the Dreamwidth feed has been switched over to your new site). Thank you! Wanted to be sure I didn’t miss any of your posts.
Almost done with Hild and am really enjoying it. It’s very full of bits that make me think about the world in new ways. Thank you!