I just uploaded a torrent for the first time after joining the site today, and I'm not sure how to establish a seed for it. I'm relatively new to this, so any explanation of how I might be a dork for not getting how this works would be great, the basics are fine by me. Thanks!

Welcome to the site  

I notice you were briefly showing as a leecher on your upload which would suggest that you successfully loaded .torrent file in your client, but it was just looking in the wrong place for the files. Simply re-download the .torrent file from here, and open it in again in your client (I'm guessing transmission from your snatches). Transmission will then show you a list of all the files contained in the torrent. The key part now is to click where it says 'Destination folder', then click 'Other' and browse to the location of the folder you used to create the torrent file. Your client will then check that the files on your hard drive match those in the torrent and start to seed.

Thanks so much, I think that did it. Speedy response time too, much appreciated.