September 2005 in the Life of Ben (Blog)
Curveshire Cancelled (12th September 2005)
I made a full announcement on GTAForums about this a few days ago but I think I should say it here as well.
Handling Assistance (12th September 2005)
I have been helping out with the handling for some exotic projects because my tutorials don’t cover the things they are trying to do. Most notable is the [DRuG] NikT’s Easter Bay Aircraft Carrier, which is a conversion of the aircraft carrier you steal a Hydra from into a boat you can actually drive around. I helped convert the handling for the Dozer from rear wheel steering to front wheel steering for Dazla’s JCB 4CX vehicle.
I regularly look through the Editing Discussion > Vehicles section of GTAForums and help out the topics which I havn’t covered in tutorials. Now that this site has been restyled it is ready for some extra content, so I hope to write a couple more tutorials this month.
Project Cerbera Style Overhaul (12th September 2005)
For the past month I have not uploaded any updates to the site because I was working on a new visual theme for it. It is nearly finished now so I have uploaded the site so that everything is in the new style, now. I will be writing new content for some areas of the site and making more regularly news updates now. There is currently a gap between the navigation box and the header which I cannot seem to fix. without everyone’s favourite browser going mental.
I want to get the server set up a bit better too, so that the site uses cleaner URLs and returns the proper HTTP Error 410: Gone status for old images that I have deleted. They are still linked to from forums and other websites and are creating quite a lot of HTTP Error 404: File Not Found errors at the moment, which is rather unhelpful. I’ll have to talk to my host about setting the server to display a new error page called 410.shtml instead of the browser’s default error page. I’ve got custom error pages for some other common errors but not the 410 one.
People who have visited this site for a long time might remember that very early in its history, I used a similar theme on the main page. A light brown or tan background with teal features and red links is quite a classic website theme, so you might have seen the general concept on many other sites. I think it works well, a lot better than the random browns I was using before.
I’ve also thrown some proper fonts at the content, with Lucida Sans for normal text and uses Lucida Console for code samples. They are lovely, modern fonts but if you don’t have them, your browser will use a default font of the same type.