Journal tips and suggestions

[Administrator]

Creativity Your journal should be interesting and eye-catching. First post or posts should set the tone and introduce the reader to the franchise, including the teams, the era and the personalities. Your franchise doesn't have to be the 2012 NFL... in fact, after a few seasons, with trades, new players and team relocations, many of the personalities and storylines will deviate from reality anyway. A nifty idea is to take a team from a different era, like the Bears of the 70's...or just create an entirely fictional league from the ground up! http://www.maddenteams.com/ has artwork for hundreds of fictional teams, or you can make your own. On FF, one of the best journals featured the 86 Dolphins. The main personality travelled back in time and took charge of the team, with a complete storyline.

Presentation Again, keep the reader's interest. Posting a copy of the Madden game log really isn't interesting to anyone if it doesn't include details of how it was achieved (how great that the game MVP rushed for two TDs, and it's about time he started living up to that contract which we never heard the end of in preseason). A news article or an interview with a key player or coach livens things up. If you're so inclined, graphics and video can spice things up. Don't post .rpl (instant replay) files. It's a bit unrealistic to expect anyone to download your .rpl, save it and then open up Madden just to watch it. Youtube is excellent, and the forum has BBcode for it. Just copy everything after "v=" and put it between the Youtube tags.

How to make videos? A program called "Fraps" is probably the leading option for recording your games or highlights. When it's running, you just press F9 when you want to start recording, and then again when you want to stop. Each recording creates a different video file in a specified folder. There are different settings for frames per second and video size, you'll want to experiment with the settings as well as your Madden video effects for best performance. (Try recording a game on your old Pentium 4 with 512M RAM, it'll be sluggish beyond belief and don't even think about trying to kick a field goal... ) When you've got your video clips, there are several options for working with and editing them. Windows Movie Maker either comes with, or can easily be added onto, any modern version of Windows. You can clip, add fades, wipes and other transitions, use captions and titles, and even narrate with a microphone. If you want to get high-tech, Adobe Premiere can turn out some great finished products (it's used to create special effects for Hollywood movies, among other things.) If narrating is your thing, you can record with software such as Audacity or Cool Edit Pro. You can also change the pitch and speed of your voice to simulate other players and personalities.

Detail The more detail, the better. You're actually creating a "canon" of your very own alternate reality. Again, even if you're the 2012 Colts, a few seasons down the line it will break away from reality, Peyton will be gone and you'll have a storyline of a team perhaps rebuilding, and a search for someone to fill his shoes. Another great perk of spending so much time on your journal: you're not playing the actual game as often. This will make your games more important and special. If you play Madden nonstop for 18 hours and go thru an entire season, culminating with a loss in the AFC Title game, big deal, you'll probably win it tomorrow. But if your season took several days or even weeks or months to get thru, each win becomes more meaningful, and a season-ending loss will sting, just as it would in real life. I personally spend at least as much time on my journal as actually playing the game. I also have a Wiki with many articles about my team, league personalities and some info about the league itself and its history. It creates some redundancy if my journal is ever lost. By the way, if you spend considerable time on your journal, you might want to back it up, guys...as our FFers know, you can wake up one morning and a site has gone down, leaving you with no way to recover your work.

Participation Be active in reading other members' journals, and they'll probably be interested in returning the favor. Keep the commenting at a minimum though, in a good "flowing" journal, the vast majority of the posts will be by the owner. Posts such as "great journal, man!" are ok, but they "flow" better if you suspend your disbelief and add something of substance. (In my Grudlies journal, someone responded, complimenting the journal and also indicating that they were from Toronto, and to please "sign me up for season tickets!") Such posts also shouldn't interrupt or take over the "canon" or storyline. "I just heard that [your team's star running back] got a DUI" wouldn't be very welcome. But if the owner posted the same storyline, a response that "As a fan I'm outraged, if I owned the team I would cut ties with him" might add substance, because it's similar to something a real fan might say on a radio talk show, or in a letter to the editor.

Technical discussions (such as questions about how to implement Fraps or a request for a detailed breakdown of how the author created the Telestrator effect) should take place in another forum.

Happy journaling!

[Administrator]

For hard-core franchise journal doers, a wiki might be a neat idea. One can be started at http://www.wikia.com or one of many other sites. Or, if you have webspace and SQL, the wiki software is open source and not too difficult to set up (if you're moderately knowledgeable about such things.)

Example: http://www.footballidiot.com/wiki/index ... o_Grudlies

[WillProsper]

Where do I find the "v=" on my youtube video?

For example, this is all I can find for my first attempt:

https://youtu.be/RKz2aU3buTA

<iframe width="1280" height="720" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/RKz2aU3buTA?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

[NickyJ]

Don't use an embedded link. When you load the video's page, the url at the top of the screen is the one you should copy from. For example, the video you just posted has this url:

Code: Select all

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKz2aU3buTA

Copy the part after "v=" from there, and you'll be good to go. Using that video as an example:

Code: Select all

[youtube]RKz2aU3buTA[/youtube]

[WillProsper]

Thank you Sir!

[Kevin5455]

Uhh...thank you, I guess...