Blogging has been all the rage for many years now. Housewives lament their laundry, teenagers berate their classmates with cuber bullying, CEOs reveal too much, and tech journalists informally review gadgets. There are all manner of blogs out there and various portals and options for their hosting. So as we wrote out the list of features for tkArena we decided that no self-respecting website in 2009 would be complete without blogs and furthermore, why not share the creation of blog content with our readers so that our readers become writers and help to mold the very fabric of the site itself?

I could start going into a predictable diatribe about strands in the Web 2.0 existence, but let's instead get right down to details about how you can create your own blog on tkArena and quickly get your techie-self known to the wider world. It's actually so simple that I wondered whether this guide was even necessary, but here we are...

After you have registered as a member of Tech Knowledge Arena, click on the Blogs tab. Scroll down the bottom and click on Create My Blog.

You will be presented with a form to fill out. From top to bottom, here's an explanation for everything on the form. It’s good to note also that you can go back and change the settings after the blog is setup, if you change your mind about anything.

Title: That's pretty self explanatory. You can just call it Yourname's blog - or it give a more catchy heading.

Description: What are you going to blog about? What type of blog is it? Give us a brief overview.

Blog Options

Make this blog public - you can keep it private so only you can see it if you don't have this box ticked.

Allow user to post comments - feedback is always good.

Approval for user comments required - If you want to sort through the comments before they go public, use this option.

Allow anonymous users to post comments - if this is ticked, readers who are not members of tkArena will be able to post comments.

Approval for anonymous comments required - if this is ticked you will get to read over the anonymous posts before they are published.

Allow Trackback comments – This option permits users of other blogs to link back to your blog inputting a comment automatically.

Approval for Trackback comments required– If this option is checked, you will receive an approval request for all the trackback comments before they go live

Trackback Auto Discovery (Client Mode) – This option enables the most recent blog entries module to search for any links in your blog post and verify if those links are trackback enabled or not. If the searched links are trackback enabled, a trackback notification is automatically sent to those files.

Send mail notification after comments and trackbacks are posted - if this is ticked you will get an email every time there is a new comment or Trackback.

Use CAPTCHA for comments – This option requires a commenter to complete visual CAPTCHA ("Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Humans and Computers Apart"). This prevents your blog from spammers and spambots.

When displaying your identity use: With this option you can decide to have your blog under your username or under your actual full name. By using a username you can effectively be anonymous.

Syndication Options: By ticking the option to Syndicate this blog you allow people to subscribe to your blog as a web feed. If you tick this option the little RSS button will appear next to your blog listing. If a reader clicks on that link they will be shown a feed of your recent blogs. They can then also choose to subscribe to the feed.

Syndicate independently – You can check this option if you want your blog to be syndicated as its own separate RSS feed.

Use this email for the "ManagingEditor" RSS field: This is the email option for how people with RSS questions about your blog can contact you.

Date and Time Options

Time Zone: pick your time zone from the drop down list.

Culture: For some reason only English (United States) is available as an option. We don't think that it's the only culture that exists! This is some sort of limitation with the blog software we're using. But the culture is not listed anywhere in your blog anyway. It's just a redundant setting.

Date Format: Choose how you want the date to be listed.

Child Blogs: If you want to get really into blogging you can set up different blogs for different topics called Child Blogs. You could for example have a personal blog, gadget blog, PC blog, digital photography blog etc. Or of course you can just cover everything in the one blog. It's up to you.

Click on Update at the bottom of the form when you're done.

If you want to change any of these settings, simply go back to the Blogs tab and scroll down to Your tkArena Blog. Click on Blog Settings to be taken back to the form.