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GTA Ideas Pages |
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Hardly anybody knows that this is a project of mine, too - the reason for that being that Klamy does most of the work while I did most of the ideas.
When VCTA was conceived, the webring had grown to such proportings that any attempt such as my original webring overview was bound to fail. It was full of alike-looking GTA pages, characterized by blinking police cars, a "Files" section lifted straight from Gouranga, and original content being almost entirely missing. After I'd attemted another sojourn of the webring which was thwarted after half a dozen steps in either diection because sites were down or had non-existent or non-functional webring links, a historc chat took place between schu, Klamy and me, in which we exchanged our views on the state of the webring, resulting in schu promoting us to co-managers of the GTA webring.
Shortly after that, Klamy had finished his first movie, and he told me he had some time to spend and asked me for suggestions on how to do it. I had long longed for an organized link list that would let me find GTA resources on the web fast. VCTA was to list every page on the webring, linking directly into the sites, and group them in a category scheme. I expected very large categories of pages with "Files" taken from Gouranga and "Cheats" etc., so any potential new GTA webmaster could see there were enough of those already and leave his hands off it.
The name was my invention, it was to fit in the "real-life" Vice City Style promoted by Klamy's role-playing game. The basic design, with one frame for an index and another "main" frame that could be bookmarked for the sites was mine, too; even the ability to view it stand-alone or as a frameset. Looking back on it, the index should have been kept entirely to the index frame, but what the heck...
It took Klamy about 3 days to browse all of the webring, and the first installment of VCTA went online. He did not index my site because he felt it was to "massive", and I was too busy/lazy to submitted an index. (With my new "Contents" page for the new GTA Ideas design, this is bound to change ;-) Vice City TA was to take off like wildfire, with everyone submitting their new pages to us for inclusion, but that never happened. Maybe VCTA was born too late, or maybe it lacked promotion, I am not sure which.
VCTA was left to its own devices for some time; it moved from a "free" account to be hosted by warcenter via mugwum and, after that, to its present friendly home on www.klamy.co.uk/vcta/. It saw a slight reorganization of its categories, instilled by me because I felt it should have more structure and address our visitors needs more clearly; again Klamy did the work.
Then mugwum started having some irc chat rounds. One event had mugwum hold a competition where everyone was to complete URL-seeking challenges as fast as possible. That was great fun, but not GTA-related at all. Thinking about a more GTA-related competition, I hit upon the VCTA competition. This idea was almost entirely mine, I did actually produce a set of three web pages describing the competition, and after some delays it seems it will be kicked off on September 9th, 1998. I hope it will make VCTA more popular and more useful at the same time, whilst showing that there still is some kind of GTA scene around.
Read about the competition on www.klamy.co.uk/vcta/comp/ and join in!
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GTA Ideas Pages |
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Created
by Michael Mendelsohn
