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The wardrobe will be down until further notice.

EDIT: Sorry, was in a bit of a hurry earlier. We overloaded our database server, due to our rather large visitor count for a while now. Hiroko is working on a solution, so hopefully it'll be back up in a few days.

EDIT  05/03: Hi everyone, I'm afraid I can't give an estimate when the wardrobe will be back up. Hiroko is busy with her personal life, and I don't have a secondary programmer who knows PHP and MySQL. If anyone is experienced in these both areas, and would like to help out, I'd be eternally grateful. If so, please email me at linda@hellolace.net. 

Thank you for your support, everyone!

Hello everyone,

As you may have noticed, we're always working on improving the site. Our search engine has been a bit wonky ever since we did our little wardrobe revamp (among other changes). We're currently trying to fix this problem, so the search will be unavailable for perhaps a day or two. I'm not sure about the exact timespan, as we're also having some issues with our host. I apologize for the downtime, and hope you will understand.

The wardrobe will of course be up as usual. If you need to find an item badly, Google indexed most of our site. You can use it to search by inputting, for example: "Lady Rose" site:http://hellolace.net.

Also, in case you haven't noticed, we've also begun to add other brands, such as MAXICIMAM, Antique BeasT, Millefleurs and Putumayo to the database as well.

In case statistics interest you, we currently have a total of 3505 items in the database. Our most added brand is Angelic Pretty, with 1820 entries. Our most popular category is JSK's with 1017 entries, and most of our entries are from 2010 (1137 items). 2009 is a close follow-up though. We also do put a lot of focus on really old items (early 2000's).

I added a small addition to the The Fashion page, under The Name: Lolita. I will also add a new page that will pop up under What Is Lolita? perhaps later today. 

The wardrobe images now all open in lightbox if clicked, so you can see the bigger image. Notice that they still load directly, and are not thumbnails. So right-clicking and saving, or dragging the items to a folder still works. If this function is not preferred, we will remove it. You will have to comment/email us about it, however.

The wardrobe now contains worn item photos, both official and inofficial. We also added an extra line of links to the left, as well as "top" links to the headers - all for easy navigation of the page and decreased need for scrolling.

If you are interested in submitting worn item photos, please take a look at this Livejournal thread at the EGL community for more information. If you do not have a Livejournal, you can write me an e-mail at linda@hellolace.net or use our contact form. Submissions are highly appreciated!

Finally added the new gallery look, and moved the Taobao links into the new Taobao Guide & Links page. Hopefully you will enjoy the new gallery, as it was a lot of work, despite it's rather simple appearance. I've added Atelier Pierrot as a new brand, as I personally find their designs to be amazingly gorgeous.

The new gallery features:

• ★ Larger thumbnails to make it easy to find the items you're looking for.
• ★ An upgraded thumbnail script, that generates better thumbnails faster. 
• ★ The ability to sort items on any page without having to use the navigation menu.
• ★ You can sort by brand, type, sub-type, year and change how many entries to be displayed per page.
• ★ New, simple pagination.
• ★ The ability to sort by all entries and view latest entries added to the database.

Please notice that the new gallery uses BRAND NEW URLS - so you will have to update any links linking to items in the wardrobe. I apologize for the inconvenience.

The inspiration gallery and the downloads will also be updated with a matching look later.

The biggest update today is that we have a new member on the team, Elisabeth. She's a lovely Lolita who will be acting as the second programmer for the site. 

For some sadder news, Hiroko is currently hospitalized. I don't know when she'll be able to return, and neither did she, last time I heard from her. As Hiroko is the main programmer for the site, the changes we were going to apply have been pretty much halted for a few weeks now. Me and Elisabeth are going to look it over to see if we can speed it up a bit.

Other news include the addition of the Deco Lolita style page, changing the alignment of the heart bullets for the lists, and correcting a small typo on the style pages. I will submit a huge batch of icons tomorrow (previously posted on EGL). The credits page has also been updated.