Having trouble exporting animations/bones from Blender

[kidwithsword]

After getting down the basics of modelling I am now working my way toward creating custom animations. I use Blender and I have the .smd exporter that is linked to on the Valve Dev wiki. I have made a small rotation animation of some mechanic arms on the model using bones and weight painting the vertices to each appropriate bone. When I play back the animation with alt+A it plays back fine, no problems. I export the .smd as an animated model and the model works fine. The material loads and the physics model has been optimized and everything. However, none of the bones that I create are exported. When I export the model, I click on the model first and then the armature. I've parented the model to the armature and the animation plays like it should.

Here is the .qc if it makes a difference, but I don't think it does:

$body mininuke "mininuke.smd"
$modelname "custom\username\mininuke.mdl"
$cdmaterials "custom\username\"
$sequence idle "mininuke.smd"
$sequence open "mininuke_Action.smd"
$collisionmodel "mininuke.smd"

Screenshot of model (isn't very clear but it should get the point across)

[img_thumb]http://www.cubeupload.com/files/232000lehp.png[/img_thumb]

I am still just grasping exactly how animation works with models, so feel free to insult me for making a stupid mistake. I am prone to making them.

I should add that the animation is 100 frames long and in the model viewer the animation I made, "open", is 100 frames long. The tick goes along the bottom of the screen but the model doesn't have the bones so it doesn't animate.

[kidwithsword]

Really? Absolutely no one knows how to do this?