I've been meaning to do this for a while. Let me confess: I am sick and tired of people sending me shit they want posted here; and of course, and this is inevitable, now, this very instant. Like the other night when my friend Tracey Denton sends out a request to have her event with Christine Quinn, gag, for the next day. Here's a really dumb idea: don't treat bloggers like your own personal press staff. Don't assume that we just sit around waiting for your pearls of wisdom or import.

Here's another idea: how about you sign up for an account and post your own stuff? What, I need to lend my name, implying endorsement, to Quinn? Do you know what I deduce from these things? That the people making these requests just don't have much respect for us here at all. We're not trained monkeys; maybe worthwhile to point that out occasionally.

Or, say, my friend Rock, who has been sending me his stuff in Word format for years. What you see on this site under Rock's handle? T'was all me. And it's simply not the case that I don't like being helpful. But after years of this, I now need to reinstall my entire Office Suite, because the last document he sent me was infected with something. Coincidentally, our friends at Room Eight provide the same service to Mr. Hackshaw.

In addition, since, again, I try to be helpful, I've laid out to Rock several times, in detail, how this site works. I'm the first to grant that this site has an asinine architecture. But five-year-olds can do this. This is basic literacy in 2009, one would think. It's like having someone read you the newspaper because you can't read, or, in Rock's case, simply can't be bothered to figure shit out.

So here we go. I know that Rock isn't the only one who has had problems with this bizarre site, true enough. So this isn't just for him.

If you don't have an account, create one. That seems to work fine for most people, even if this site produces the craziest errors I've ever seen. Ignore them; TDG just does that to annoy the fuck out of everyone.

Once you have the account, log in. Provide your password to do so.

Look at the top right-hand corner of the page. Ignore everything except the "Post a blog entry" link. Click on that.

Great. Now you're in the screen I'm looking at right now. Ignore everything - especially the forest of categories; more on that in a bit - except this: the title field, and the larger field called Body. That's your blog post. Give it a title, and write or cut'n'paste your diary in the container marked body. That's it.You should also go to the top "categories" field and give some tags to describe your content. This allows Google, for example, to help find your content. Just don't go nuts with the eight data fields. You only need one. Some accounts have a little HTML toolbar that lets you do some nifty things like bold stuff; nice, but not essential.

When you're done, hit preview. If everything's okay, great: hit submit.

And that's it. The site will occasionally have the hiccups, but this is how it works. Like I said, five-year-olds can do this. Candidates for City Council shouldn't be any less resourceful.