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The inception of Lead the Revolution contest forced me in a way to write this text. It will be short and in the next few minutes I will try to show how to write a decent Manifesto quickly and efficiently. Decent does not mean perfect, though, and by no means I am writing this to show the winning formula for the competition. My goal is to make it easy to use our panel.

There are no guidelines on how to write a perfect text. Someone or something has to make you feel inspired – obviously I cannot help you with that. But if you already have an idea it has to be conveyed bearing in mind not to write only for writing’s sake. Writing a decent manifesto, however, will need some tools, legal and free of course.

Open Office is a free equivalent of Microsoft Office package. The included word processor will pick up orthographic and some punctuation mistakes. I think that for the gamers generation operating this software is nothing new, so I will skip that part. A similar function to that of a word processor can be carried out by Firefox - a popular Internet browser underlines our mistakes in red.

As far as creating and adding a screen shot is concerned, it is a bit more complicated, but only a bit. We will be aided by two small programs Gadwin PrintScreen and IrfanView. With the help of the former we will make screen shots (or “photos” from the game, or anything that is displayed on the monitor) very quickly. The latter will help us to make our pictures smaller. More advanced users already know that we can use Irfanview to make screen shots as well, but I recommend Gadwin PrintScreen for it always “hides” on the toolbar as we never know when we are going to make a quick snap.

When we already have both programs installed everything becomes extremely simple: we right-click on hidden on the toolbar Gadwin PrintScreen, from menu we pick properties and then Usage tab.

Here we tick automatic file naming, input the name for the series of screen shots – in my case “Manifesto Guidelines” – and folder where the files will be saved to. Next we move on to Display tab and select our files’ extensions – Bitmap JPEG (*.jpg). Then we move to the Source tab and pick “current window” and do the last step by going to preferences and picking PrintScreen as the shortcut key. For convenience I suggest deselecting show information messages and show captured picture and selecting start on Windows start-up. As many of you have probably noticed we can choose the size of the captured picture, however it is not recommended as we can easily make a big picture smaller, whilst doing otherwise is not so easy…

Having the program set up we start our game and at any time we press Printscreen, this will save a picture in our folder – in my instance in folder called Manifestos will appear files named Manifesto Guidelines001, Manifesto guidelines002, etc. When we have enough of pictures of our tactics, squad, or fixture list we exit the game, for instance by using Alt+Tab, and start processing our pictures.

We open a picture in Irfanview from Image menu we select Resize/Resample and input width of 500px – this is the maximum amount accepted by the panel for adding Manifestos. It is worth noticing that if we are interested only in a fragment of a photo we can cut it with the help of humble Paint. Then we log in to CM Revolution, create a Manifesto, and add pictures we have just prepared. As quick and easy as it gets.

Of course pictures, in any size, can be uploaded to one of many free hosting sites. I recommend Imageshack, although the competition is really big http://www.fothost.pl/, http://fotosik.pl/, http://photobucket.com/, etc. Next, using the appropriate button in our panel, we can easily include a picture in a Manifesto. What ‘the appropriate button’ means? You just roll over each of them and the description will be displayed.

Sometimes it happens that into the manifesto editor you copy a text directly from Word and, upon clicking “draft” or “publish” nothing happens. In that case you have to copy the whole text from the editor to Notepad, then select all once again and paste it back to the editor. If it happens while writing “by hand” instead of copying from Word the solution is the same.

Apart from adding pictures or YouTube clips (yes, this is also possible!), you can easily make your competition works or all Manifestos better by not misspelling our nicks! Deputy Prime Minister is A. (full stop and space!) De Raph; Grzechoo and Grzelo are two different people; pictures to my text were added most probably by jakubkwa (yes, there are two k’s in his nick). Henkel should not be aggrieved that I will not explain how to inflect his nick – it is disputed even among the Cabinet. Another remark – a space character is placed after a full stop, comma, exclamation or question marks, etc. never before. Match results should be written 1:0. Does not it look better than 1 : 0, 1-0, or 1 – 0?

Finally, I come to a rule that is so obvious that I failed to mention it before: do not mix tenses in your texts – write either in present or in past, the combination of these is very unpleasant to read. And at least try to form compound sentences, you will make it with a little bit of commitment. Manifestos are yours – as you can see with the exception of some basic rules and sense of decency we try not to interfere, and these guidelines are not any form of terms and conditions but merely a piece of good advice. Good luck!

Below you can find links to aforementioned software and web addresses that are worth visiting once in a while:
Irfanview