The first thing you will need to do on entering this section is to create a new blog by entering a filename, then clicking "Go". Doing so will take you to a page where you can set up this blog (clicking the "Edit settings" link next to an existing blog will do the same thing). From this screen, you can give your blog a title which will be displayed on the site. You can choose whether to use WYSIWYG editing (if this has been eabled on your site), as well as whether to accept comments on entries by default, to show usernames and the times of posts. If you choose to show permalinks, each entry will have with it a link which can always be used to view that precise entry.

Trackbacks allow other sites which mention you to let you automatically. They can include your trackback URL when they post, and a link from your site to theirs will appear. You can also choose whether smiley characters such as :) should be replaced with graphics automatically, whether swearwords should be censored and whether blog directories should be "pinged" when you create a new entry - this is particularly useful for podcast feeds and the directories can be chosen in the setup area. Once you're done, click "Save".

When you have a blog, click on its name to view existing entries or add a new one. If you are site administrator, you will see all entries; otherwise you will only see those posted by you. Clicking on the name of an entry lets you edit it; you can also make it sticky, which means it always appears at the top of the blog, as well as moving entries up or down or deleting them. If an entry has comments, and you have permission, you can click on a link next to it to edit the comments that have been posted.

Clicking on an existing title or the "Add entry" link takes you to the blog editing page. First off, you need to give your new post a title. You can then enter some content in the top box, which will appear on the main blog page (if you're using the "News" view, an extract of this text will appear). There's also the option to add some more text, which will only appear if a user clicks on a "Read more" link.

The script supports adding videos automatically, as long as they're in the .flv format. It's simple - upload a video file to the files/ directory. If you want to, you can also upload a preview image of it. Then you just insert this code:

<showvideo>files/videoname.flv</showvideo>

And your video will automatically be inserted. The preview image should be a JPEG, called videoname.jpg, and should also be uploaded into the files/ directory. Finally, if you want, you can "brand" all of your videos with your site's logo. Just upload a little file called vidlogo.png, vidlogo.gif or vidlogo.jpg into the gfx/ directory on your site and it will be automatically overlaid on your videos.

Converting your videos to .flv is easy. Check out Riva FLV Encoder, or, if you're a Mac user, get the trial version of VisualHub.

You can add URLs to send trackbacks to at the bottom of the posting page, as well as attaching a file to a post for podcasting. You can add up to 10 tags - these can be used to find similar entries in the blog. You can also choose whether to make a post sticky and whether you want users to be able to comment and send trackbacks on it. Finally, if you are posting a new entry, you can choose whether you want to send it to a mailing list on the site.