We have added a community calendar

You can access the calendar from the top menu bar or near the top of the left menu.

Feel free to add events important to you and/or the community. This includes your birthday, your pet's birthday, anniversaries, or any event important to you, that you don't mind sharing.

Plugging in events is fairly intuitive so click the date and fill out the form. If you mess up your first try like I did, don't worry you can always delete, and you get all the do overs you want.

BTW, if you haven't done a personal page, it all starts on preferences. Take a look at Rita's new page for a few hints and ideas.

To greater or lesser degrees we all want to keep our personal information private.

Therefore the default for perferences has so far been private vs public. Either way is okay but a couple of things can be clarified. By public, it means public to other members, not the world. What it means is this, http://habitablezone.net/tiki-user_information.php?userId=11.

Your real name is not included and as you can see your email address is also left off if that is your choice. All it shows is some basic information on your member status, a box to send you a quick internal message and a link to your member home page. You can view what information would be displayed by clicking on My Infos on your My Tiki menu.

It's no big deal either way but I thought I would clarify public info for those who might wish to allow their member information to be viewed.
 

Creating a blog

On the create blog page you will see a space for the blog title and the description. The title can be anything. This one waas Hints from rita Book but it could have been almost anything.

The description can be anything but it should be ralatively short and descriptive like "wisdom of the ages by Rita", My daily musings, etc,etc.

I suggest that you leave all the unchecked boxes below as they are except for the box on showing your avatar if you would like for it to be at the top of all your posts. Leave the box on allowing others to post unchecked since others can still comment but have no business posting on your blog 

The final step in creation is to click save at the bottom of the page. Your blog should now be created and in the List of blogs.

Posting to your blog
 

Go to List Blogs and click on the stylus icon in the action column (the second icon from the left). This will bring up the posting page. A blank slate with numerous formating aids at the top. As you will see there are lots of helpful options such as image linking, background and text color, heading options, etc.etc. There is even an option to paste from MSword if you have pre-written your post.

After you have entered your message click save or save and exit at the bottom of the page. If you leave the page without saving your work will be lost.

That's all there is to it. You now have your own blog and you have made your first post. Others can read your blog and they can enter comments at the bottom. The comments are subject to moderator approval (that should be you in the case of your blog but it is not working right at present and editors have to approve the comments).

You can post daily and/or as often as you like and share your wisdom with the other members.