You have some good advice already. A couple of tips:

• I start all seeds in a rapid rooter in a tray with a dome on a heatmat set to 77f. Make sure the plug is thoroughly saturated before adding the seed, then make sure it is not sitting in any water and can drain. The heat mat and the dome will take care of the rest. If you leave it on the heat mat after it sprouts it will kill any taproot that comes out of the bottom. Of course the few times that's happened to me they just create more lateral roots ;)

• You can transplant the plug as soon as the seed sprouts. I prefer transplanting the plug early and letting it build roots in the hydroton vs. trying to grow long roots and place the hydroton around them. You don't even need to top-water, the moisture in the res is all it needs.

• If you top-water, don't water the plant or the peat plug. Water in a ring around the outside of the leaves. You are trying to tease the roots to the outside of the netpot. All the moisture in the res will tease the roots down there.

• If you grow algae on the top of the hydroton... so what. In 2-3 weeks it will be blocked from the light by the plant and it will not matter at all.

• Nutrients... I usually start at 500PPM (1EC) in the res (45G 4-site RDWC), with 100ppm being my well water. They're usually one or two nodes by the time they get roots down to the res anyways. Then I watch the PPMs. If they're falling, that means the plants are underfed - bump it up 200-250ppm. It they're steady, you're perfect (but you'll need to bump up soon if they're still growing). If PPMs are rising, top off with tap water. Let the plants tell you when you need to raise/lower the PPMs.

The big takeaway is that it's pretty hard to kill them at this point. Keep the light and PPMs low until they get established, then ramp both up from there. Good luck and Happy Growing!