On the Topic of New Folks

Well there are a few new people on the blog and we have a couple of stragglers that should be here soon.  According to an earlier post, someone said that Susie, Chad and Ligit couldn't post.  now I know Ligit can reply to comments, because she has, but I'm going to just state in a simplistic form how to post and those of you that aren't there yet, try just posting something silly like a hello to the blog and we can be sure everyone knows how to use this forum correctly. 
 
Comments:
   Comments are the best way to discuss a topic.  Because we have a limit on who can comment(members only), discussions may often be just back and forth between a couple of people, but Pete and Josh and I have already had some fruitful debate, so that's good.  I don't have it set to alert anyone when a comment is made, so don't be concerned if someone doesn't reply to a comment you make esp. if it's a topic that's made it's way close to the bottom of the web page.  To post comments, just click the comment link at the bottom of a post and sign in to get to the comment form.  You can't read other peoples comments while you're posting one, but I may add that functionality later if we use it enough.
 
Posts:
   Posts are the way to bring up new topics to the blog.  If you see a news article or something that you think we should all take note of, or you just want to rant about something or whatever, post it!   One thing is that posts should not be answers or replies to open topics on the blog.  If someone has already opened that topic, use a comment unless you have something new to add, like a link to an article or something related(you can put links in comments too, but it's a little complicated).  To post, click on the icon at the bottom of the left sidebar that says "I power Blogger"  Then you will sign in and after selecting the House of Madness Blog you will go immediately to the form to create a post.  If you want to make a link to an article or webpage, there is a link button on the form(it looks like the infiniti sign with a picture behind it) just highlight the text you want the link to display and click that button.  Then another little box will open.  Enter the entire address(the http:// is there by default, so don't let that appear twice but it has to be there) in that box and click ok.  If you look at the box there are also options for ftp and mailto and all sorts of other shit, but we won't haggle about those now.  When you use the link button, you will notice that the HTML(that's hyper text markup language btw) script appears.  Just continue to type past it, and when you view the post it will display as a link and not a bunch of html garbage.  If you pay attention to how the script is written, you can copy that and reinsert a different address and different display text when you're typing a comment and bingo, you've got comments with links.  If you want to make the title of your post be a link, just highlight that text before you click the link button and when the post displays it will look all cool and have colored dots above the title(see below).  Click the Publish Post button to finalize your post.
 
So there you have it.  Let's leave this post open for questions about functionality and any errors anyone is getting.  If we continue having issues getting Dave and Elan on, I might open comments to anonymous users so that at least everyone can comment.  That opens the site to trolls and whackos that might happen upon our little space, so I'd like to avoid that.