Toate paginile sunt gata, dar fututul ăsta de Mac n-are un spell checker în Română și pun pariu că sunt o grămadă de greșeli p-acolo… Mai corectez eu pe parcurs, dar am vrut să-o pun pe fir cât de repede posibil, așa că o greșeală-două acolo nu mai contează ;)

Nu știu dac-o să reușesc pân-la urmă să fac ș-un blog —că mi-e lene— dar, până una alta, am să bag toate articolele în Română în categoria asta de pe blog-ul de aici și vedem mai încolo.

Bagă un bookmark, că nu strică ;)

Updates will come at the same pace with the English and Japanese versions, but I haven’t made up my mind yet whether to add a Romanian blog to it or just stick with a dedicated category on this very blog.

But that’s for another time; right now, it’s time to sleep. ;)

Thanks for reading!

The e-mail address —previously ｔａｔｔｏｏ＠ｇｒａｐｈｉｃｔｒｉｂｅ．ｊｐ— also changes to the .com one.

If you happen to have any links pointing to the Japanese site, please take a minute and rewrite them to point to the current address. You can also delete ｔａｔｔｏｏ＠ｇｒａｐｈｉｃｔｒｉｂｅ．ｊｐ from your address books, I’m not using it anymore.

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading this!

Hopefully, I’ve dealt with the relocation smoothly enough; there shouldn’t be any broken links or anything like that. Google’s already picking up the change, a month or so and the new URL will replace the old one.

Please update your links —no rush though, I’ll be keeping the domain online until February next year, while redirecting all requests to the new address— and, if you happen to hit a 404, let me know about it so I can fix the motherfucker ;)

Thank you!

Last night I stayed up late fixing links and sitemaps and anything else on whatever sites I have access to, so all is left is figuring out the fucking .htaccess redirects; which is a pain in the ass, because the regular rules don’t seem to work; I have Options +MultiViews enabled and that, somehow, fucks up the way Redirect permanent /tattoos/filename http://graphictribe.com/filename behaves. No biggie though, all the links on the old pages point now to the new ones and the 404s are —hopefully— as helpful as they can get :)

So, if you had any pages bookmarked, please update them by removing “tattoos/” from the URL.

Here’s a list of what goes where:

• graphictribe.com/tattoos/ becomes graphictribe.com/
• graphictribe.com/tattoos/contact becomes graphictribe.com/contact
• graphictribe.com/tattoos/about becomes graphictribe.com/about
• graphictribe.com/tattoos/sitemap becomes graphictribe.com/sitemap
• graphictribe.com/tattoos/guide becomes graphictribe.com/guide
• graphictribe.com/tattoos/gallery becomes graphictribe.com/gallery
• graphictribe.com/tattoos/gallery-portrait becomes graphictribe.com/gallery-portrait
• graphictribe.com/tattoos/gallery-biomechanic becomes graphictribe.com/gallery-biomechanic
• graphictribe.com/tattoos/gallery-composition becomes graphictribe.com/gallery-composition
• graphictribe.com/tattoos/gallery-dragon becomes graphictribe.com/gallery-dragon
• graphictribe.com/tattoos/gallery-nature becomes graphictribe.com/gallery-nature
• graphictribe.com/tattoos/gallery-kitsch becomes graphictribe.com/gallery-kitsch
• graphictribe.com/tattoos/gallery-tribal becomes graphictribe.com/gallery-tribal
• graphictribe.com/tattoos/gallery-trigon becomes graphictribe.com/gallery-trigon
• graphictribe.com/tattoos/gallery-ring becomes graphictribe.com/gallery-ring
• graphictribe.com/tattoos/gallery-lettering becomes graphictribe.com/gallery-lettering
• graphictribe.com/tattoos/faq becomes graphictribe.com/faq
• graphictribe.com/tattoos/link becomes graphictribe.com/link

The old pages will stay in place for a little while —Google seems to have already caught up with the change so I guess a week or two should do— but won’t be updated anymore, so make sure you’re viewing the new ones (without “tattoos/” in the URL) when you visit ;)

Thanks for reading this!

I’ve been putting this off for too long and now, that I finally managed to defeat procrastination and spare an hour for this upgrade, I’m willing to bet my life 2.8.5 comes out, like, tomorrow :)

It wouldn’t be the first time and it’s not something that happens only with my blog “maintenance” habits either… About three years ago —when my box bit the dust and panic was the new black— I went to the A$$£€ Store, bought a shiny brand new (literally, the latest box at the time) iMac and resumed work… only to find out that a couple of days later the bastards released a new model, screen 2 inches wider, hard drive a few hundred gigabytes bigger, for the same price! Mother. Fucker.

It goes on and on; bottom line, luck is not my strongest point :)

Nor writing captivating articles, so I guess that’s it for now (actually, I’m pissed at the spell checker for flagging “fucker”, but that’s another story).

I’ll be back with a schedule-related announcement, so stick around or go a couple of hours in the future and read it ;)

Switched back to HTML 4, ported the template I’ve been using on the Japanese blog and modified it a little to make it match the colour scheme of the main website —together with other tiny tweaks here and there— and to keep it from breaking apart until I manage to remove all XHTML 1.1 stuff I have in the older posts, added Lightbox for some of the images in the articles and, generally, fiddled with every possible line of code I could find :)
Again, the themes management got really good in WordPress 2.7; that helped a lot. Except for the search pages and the 404s, I could preview all the changes without the need to switch to the new theme. Fucking awesome feature!

The header image is not ready, I will replace it with a proper one as soon as I’m sure everything looks alright in other browsers too (so far I’ve only checked it in Safari).
Of course, M$I€ gets the finger; not gonna waste my time with that piece of shit.

What’s left to do is going through all the posts and get rid of the trailing slashes and xml:attributes, fixing a couple of broken links and stuff like that.
And then install Firefox and Opera, poke around to see how the CSS behaves and fix all those little incompatibilities too.
This is going to happen tonight, because tomorrow is the big day and —after I reopen the studio— I have a feeling this is the last chance I have to actually sit at the computer for more than 10 minutes at a time :)

As usual, if you happen to find anything weird or broken, let Dali know about it ;)

Of course it won’t validate 100% :\ WordPress outputs XHTML 1.0 so I get lots of warnings about the trailing slashes in empty elements (<br>, <hr>, <img> and the likes) because this is supposed to validate as HTML 4.01 Strict, but otherwise it’s all good… I mean, it’s valid, but with those stupid errors. An XHTML to HTML plugin should be easy to write, but why bother?

Off topic: Yay, the latest ACP is out! Gotta update. Web design can wait :D

From the e-mails I’ve gotten so far it seems most had a good time and I really hope it goes the same for those from whom I haven’t heard yet.

Two more days until I reopen the studio, it seems like plenty of time to get my ass in gears and do something about this blog.

Meaning that, right after this, I’m going to start the “redesign” thing.

Which means you’re probably going to see a bunch of entrails, the ugly innards and hideous HTML tags showing through the skin, but please bear with me; it’s not gonna take more than a day or two. I’m not doing a full redesign from scratch, I’m just porting the one I have on the Japanese blog —with a few tiny modifications here and there— so it’s hopefully not going to take too long.

Anyway, if you come across broken parts, don’t worry; the blog isn’t broken, it’s just ugly… or unfinished ;)

So yeah, I’ll post some more after I’m done with it.

Update:

One plus: The themes management in 2.7 is such a cool feature!!! I can preview the theme I’m working on without actually switching to it until it’s done. Saves me a lot of sweat and time!!! Pretty fucking cool!

One minus: my webhost seems to be having problems, again, with them servers… Slow like shit, refreshing one fucking page to see the changes eats up a lot of time. I hope they fix it soon!

Yes, the new studio is officially open. Well, it’s the 21^st just because the clock went past midnight a couple of hours ago but, technically, I’ll have to wait for the morning to actually open it and receive my first clients at the new place ;)

I’ve spent most of the last two days finishing up all preparations and, once I figured everything was in place, I took a couple of pictures too; but I couldn’t wait until tomorrow to show them to you, so that’s what this post is about :).

The one above is taken from the entrance; that is what you see when you come in. In the foreground, the “reception desk” —I mean, my Mac :) — and in the background, the workspace —bed and everything. Behind that there’s another desk I set up for drawing.

The one below shows a view of the studio from the “waiting area”; a better view of the bed and the drawing table.

Everything has been moved around and arranged a little different from what I had planned first, especially the bed, in order to allow me to find the best, most comfortable position during work. I’ll probably rearrange them a little more along the way, once I figure what’s needed, but I’m going to have to spend a few days actually working, so I can get a feel. In any case, the whole thing will most likely stay like it is now, except for those few centimeters I’ll probably need if there’s not enough elbow-room.

Last one is a view from behind the drawing desk, showing the bed in the foreground and —in the background, to the right— the “waiting area”. The black door around the corner is the entrance (the one with the mirror is the toilet).

So what do you think? Pretty cool, isn’t it?

You’ll have to actually visit once —these photos don’t really do it justice— but I tell you: during those cool breeze days of the autumn, this is going to be one relaxing ambiance!

I’m sure you’ll like it ;)

Off to get some sleep now, tomorrow is the big day.

Today, Sunday, June 15^th was the last day at the shop in Nakameguro. As announced previously, from Monday, June 16^th until Friday, June 20^th, the tattoo studio will be closed, so I can move the remaining stuff to the new place and get everything ready for the opening, which will happen on Saturday, June 21^st.

Basically, most of it is already done; the new furniture is in place, the internet connection is set up —I haven’t configured the WiFi yet, but that’s piece of cake, tomorrow I’ll have it up and running— and most of my tools are already there.

What remains to be done —and which is what I’m working on right now— is updating the main website and making sure everybody knows about the move.

Getting in Touch

As I mentioned above, the internet connection is already set up, so there’ll be no downtime. I’ll continue to be reachable via e-mail as usual, but I won’t stay in one place for too long, so I probably won’t be able to take any phone calls.

This blog and the main site will stay online, naturally.

What’s Coming

• A major redesign of the main website. Not just a cosmetic thing, but a thorough renewal. Most noticeably, the whole site will be rewritten in plain old HTML 4 —which basically means that Mi¢ro$oft Int€rn€t €xp£oit€r users too will be able to access the site properly— and will, once again, be black (as in “black is the new black”) and as sexy as I can manage ;) But, about this, I’ll post a separate article once I’m done; there are still a few things I need to do so I don’t have the whole picture yet.
• A major redesign of this very blog. Same as the website, there’s going to be a lot more than just a facelift; I’ve been planning to rewrite this one too in HTML 4, but it’s going to be a very time consuming thing —because I’ll have to go through all the articles and get rid of the XHTML 1.1-specific tags— so the blog comes last. I hope I can get it done before the 21^th, but I can haz no promisez :)
• Another round of bulk mailing and cussing at the ISPs, until I hear back from everyone so I can relax and be assured everybody —or, at least, everybody having an appointment after the 21^st— knows where to find me.
• Lots of catching up, especially dealing with the obese inbox with which my mailer greets me every morning and clicking a shitload of (mouse) buttons so I can help making Clipothèque look pretty and cute;)
• Everything else I’ve been putting off until after the move.

That’s it for now. Thanks a lot for reading this!

I’ll be posting updates about the move progress as soon as I have anything consistent to say. Photos too, I promise :)