Open up Poedit and choose to create a "catalog". Hopefully the terminology makes more sense to you after our discussions about how the process works. A "catalog" is a list of "message IDs". Poedit's interface is a bit unwieldy (particularly on Mac OS X), but it outperformed the other tools we tested. Follow our instructions and have some patience, and you'll get through it (we wouldn't lie to you). You need to enter data on three tabs: Project info, Paths, and Keywords.
The Project info tab is pretty straightforward. Adjust your country and the language used in your messages accordingly. You'll want to use UTF-8 as your Charset. However, don't click OK yet! You need to edit information on the other two tabs!
It's common for WordPress plugins to include a folder dedicated to holding your localization files. Often this is called "languages", "localizations", "translations" or simply "lang", and that's where you will save your .pot
file. We are choosing to name our folder...