May 2004 in the Life of Ben (Blog)
Forced Absence #3 Escalated (2nd May 2004)
My parents removed the modem from the computer on the twenty-fourth of this month so now I can not contact anyone about anything. However, this just means that I can not access forums and can not upload anything. I can still work on the site as normal because it is all layed out on my hard drive, I just can not upload anything to the web host until the modem returns.
Major Site Work (2nd May 2004)
I have been able to sneak on for quite long on some days and work on the site. I have managed to make loads of improvements, revise lots of pages, refine the style system and even added some tutorials. Because I have made so many changes, I will just list them without any great discription
- Re-wrote some parts of the articles in the Homepage section.
- Made several adjustments to the scheme used by the GTA 3 area so that it uses fewer style classes but might tweak the colours again.
- Realised that mine and DJNeuphoria’s ImporterPlus editor for GTA 3 was not on the site anymore, so I put it back as Related Works in the GTA 3 section.
- Reformatted the Handling Overhaul area of the GTA 3 section so that the images do not overlap any more.
- Made a couple of adjustments to the scheme used by the GTA 3 section so that it uses fewer style classes and looks even more refined.
- Rewrote the Handling Overhaul area of the Vice section so it now has lots of killer screenshots. Made a few refinements to the actual handling too.
- Finally got around to applying the translated text for my GTA Vice City FlagStudio, available in the Related Works area of that section.
- Updated the SSR Radar project so there are start lines for all routes.
- Created a totally new area for San Andreas, very unique styling cues but have not made a proper colour scheme for it yet.
- Re-formatted the GTA 2 sections so that the mini tables actually use the full size table class.
- Changed the way the tutorial section tables are set up in the portal area so that they are more flexible and display when the tutorials were added.
- Just about finished the formatting of Ashdexx’s car tutorial for that section but I have still got to fix some typos, bad punctuation and links.
- Rewrote the GTA 3 handling definition tutorial from scratch using the lettered, ordered list HTML object to make it much clearer than the old format.
- Added a GTA Vice City handling definition tutorial, including all the flags and links to any relevant tutorials for more detail.
- Made all the links in the links page use the same caption if there was no button and use the same tooltip if there was a button.
- Decided that all the pages will now use the same font.
- Refined and optimised all the CSS files so all are now well below 1kB.
- Change the credits area to use a slightly smaller font size.
As well as all that, I started making a new Media Player skin, this time making it in a standard Windows style so I do not have to worry about styling cues and colour schemes. I packaged it up on the 2004-05-06 and it is ready for a first release. There are more things I want to add to it but I want some feedback to see if people find what I have done useful so far.