Join the new world

So I've been working on the Weekly Power Rankings and Around the World for months, but up til now, the exact way I've worked on it has been unknown to the masses. Well, curious reader, I felt like sharing the process with all of you! Isn't that nice ^.^

WEEKLY POWER RANKINGS
Ah, the Weekly Power Rankings, the Saturday edition of this newspaper. While it looks really sporadic and discombobulated, there is a method to the madness, to quote Shakespeare 😉

I used to type out the format and structure manually, but after a few weeks I decided that it would be much smarter to start out with a template, since the article does contain the same components every week, with only the nations and write-ups differing between issues. So I typed up a template on a Word Document, and I've been using it ever since to save me some time on frivolous grunt work.


Many lethargic hours saved by one document

After the copy-pasta onto the article, the next step is to review the map. Of course, I already know the general idea of who's gonna place where, but it's always much easier to review the map and take a look at the various border changes before making a decision as to who to pick. Sometimes, the results can be surprising since a short memory is needed to stay sane in eRep 😉

So every week I take a screen cap of the map and then review the changes! Besides being helpful, the pictures are purdy :3



Take pictures to review the map changes! Also, nostalgia trip much?

After taking the photo and comparing it to the one from the week before, I quickly jot down nations who I noticed having success over the week, which is usually relatively simple because of the maps. I do the same thing for the losers of the week, and then I reorganize them according to the varying degrees of success the nations have seen.

At this point, I also take note of which nations have returned to the world and which ones have taken a break from existence. This info I can just plug into the appropriate section, quick and simple.

After that, I just put all the nations into their sections, and start with the writing! Pretty simple, huh? If I feel inspired, it takes no more than 10 minutes to write a nation's section, but because of my inherent laziness perfectionism, it usually takes far longer.

All that's left after that is to pick a piece of music and voila! A fresh Weekly Power Rankings for your entertainment!

...Yeah it's that simple.

AROUND THE WORLD
The 'Sunday' article usually ends up being pushed off until Monday or later due to my awful case of procrastination (I swear it'll kill me someday), but it actually does take a little more work than the Saturday article.

Since wars change weekly, there's no real way to make a set template to save any amount of time. That being said, however, one thing I do to make sure my typing is accurate is to simply copy-paste the previous week's article and clean off the body text, then shifting the "after" photos to the "before" section. This helps me keep all the wars I need without fearing that I might forget one, and keeps things relatively organized.

After getting all the carryover data to the article, I also toss in whatever new wars I'm interested in and prepare it for writing and pictures. Once I get all the wars I'm gonna talk about onto the page, I start writing. I usually take the pictures after writing since I have no idea when I can drag myself to work, and if I take pictures as I write they may be inconsistent. So only after I write do I take pictures.

The pictures are pretty simple most of the time; take a picture of the battleground and upload it to an image-storing server. There are some that are trickier though. Some wars are so expansive that they don't fit on a single map screen. I like to show provinces as well as national borders, so the map can't be too zoomed out. What I do instead is to snap individual sections of the map, and then glue them together using Microsoft Paint (yeah that's a thing). I make sure to stay off the edges of the map for each snapshot (just crop it out), because it both clashes with what the center, main chunk of the map looks like, and because it tends to not work out if each image is that expanded.

After fixing up the images, I'm pretty much set to publish! All that's left is to write up some Six Day War info (usually not hard to come by) and put out a Viewer's Choice music that I usually ask for the day before! Pretty simple, to be honest 😉

If there's any more questions about the process, feel free to ask! And as always...

Until next time, take care!