Glossary
Analytics— Data gathered by either blogging platform, plug-ins, or third-party services (such as Google Analytics) on visitors to a website or a blog, including such information as number of visitors, number of page views, web addresses from which visitors came to a blog, the amount of time a visitor spends on page or post, and more.
Archive— On a blog, the archive is all the older posts that no longer appear on the main page. A blog archive can be featured in a sidebar on the blog’s main page, usually organized chronologically (e.g., by month and year) or by topic.
Avatar— An image, usually small, that represents a person or group on a social media site, such as the image that appears on the left in all your posts on Twitter.
Blockquote, Pullquote— A blockquote is a direct quote from a source that appears in a blog post indented on both sides and often in a light gray box. A pullquote is a snippet of text from the blog post that is “pulled” from the run of text and appears in larger type as a design element and is often used to visually break up long blocks of text.
Blog— Short for “weblog.” The defining characteristic of a blog is that each piece of new content appears in reverse chronological order, with the newest entry appearing at the top of the web page, the next most recent entry appearing below it, and so on.
Blogging Platform— Software that turns a website into a blog. A blogging platform may be software on a computer or it may be software on the Internet provided by a blogging service such as WordPress or Blogger.
Blogosphere— The universe of all the blogs on the Internet, loosely estimated to be about 250 million blogs.
Blogroll— A list of links to other blogs, usually appearing in a sidebar, that a blogger likes and wants readers to know about. The blogroll usually lists blogs in the same general topic area as the blog.
Bulleted List, Numbered List— A bulleted list is an indented series of words, phrases, sentences or paragraphs that have a small black dot in front of each item in the list. In a numbered list, a number (instead of a dot) appears before each item.
Comment— Any statement written by a reader—or even the blogger— that appears in the “Comments” section beneath a blog post.
Content Management System (CMS)— Software that allows the user to post content to an existing website template. A blogging platform is one type of CMS.
Copyright— Legal protection against unauthorized reproduction of an author’s or a blogger’s work. In the United States, copyright is an automatic right: a blogger owns the copyright to anything he or she writes and publishes. No registration of a work with the government is necessary.
Database— A collection of data stored on a computer in a way that makes the data easily accessible and allows users to update, manage, and retrieve the data.
Deck— A second headline that appears, usually in a smaller type size, below the main headline and expands on it without repeating words or ideas.
Domain Name— A unique name used as the plain text Internet address for a website or blog (e.g., “slowlanetravel.com”). Domain name suffixes (also known as “top-level domains”) indicate the type or origin of a website: “.com” is mostly used by companies, “.org” is mostly used by nonprofit organizations, and “.edu” is used by schools, colleges, and universities. Countries have domain name suffixes, such as “.au” for Australia, “uk” for the United Kingdom, and “.ca” for Canada.
Freelancer— A writer who is paid per article or blog post.
Gallery, Slide Show— A gallery is a group of images appearing on a web page with navigation buttons (next, previous) and captions. A slide show (sometimes known as a slider) is a group of images appearing on a web page that moves from one image to the next automatically.
Graf— Short for “paragraph.” Commonly used in journalism.
Hashtag— A word or words preceded by the number sign (#multimedia) that serves as a link to other posts with the same hashtag. It serves as a way for users of social media to search for posts on a topic, and helps posters, with the addition of a hashtag, make their posts easily searchable. On Twitter and Instagram, hashtags must be one word (e.g., #SummerOlympics2016), but on Tumblr they can be multiple words (e.g., #Summer Olympics 2016).
Headline— The words that appear above a blog post. Headlines are set in larger type than body text.
HTML— Abbreviation for Hypertext Markup Language, a standardized set of commands that tell a computer how to display a web page. A helpful introduction to HTML is available at w3schools.com.
Hyperlocal— News that is primarily of interest only to a limited geographic area, such as a village, town, or small city.
Hypertext— A software system that allows users to click on a word or image and be immediately taken to another page on the Internet.
Keyword— Search engine users type in a keyword or keywords when performing a search. Bloggers can increase the chances a search engine will highly rank their posts by including keywords in the HTML meta tags of their posts.
Lede— Journalism jargon for the first paragraph of an article. The most common theory for the odd spelling is that it is used to avoid confusion with the word “lead.”
Link— A single instance of hypertext (a word, a phrase, an image) on which a reader may click to be taken to another website or web page.
Meta Tags— A statement in HTML that describes the content of a web page. Meta tags, such as keywords and descriptions, can be added by a blogger to each blog post.
Microblogging— Creating and publishing short (often constrained by character or image size limit) and usually frequent blog posts on social media platforms such as Twitter and Tumblr.
Mobile— Any small computer device, usually with Internet access, that can be easily carried by the user.
Multimedia— The use of more than one medium—e.g., text, video, audio, and hypertext—to communicate and tell stories.
Page View, Unique Visitor— A page view occurs when any reader accesses any page on your blog. A unique visitor is an individual reader, determined by the reader’s IP address, who accesses any page on your blog. If one person visits your blog 25 times in a day, that would be counted as 25 page views but only one unique visitor.
Permalink— A link that takes the reader not to the front page of a blog, but to a specific blog post.
Pingback— A notification sent by software to Blogger A when Blogger B links to Blogger A’s blog. Both bloggers must be using software with an enabled pingback function.
Pixel— Short for “picture element.” The smallest element of an image on a computer screen. The size of a pixel depends on the resolution of the computer screen. Pixels are most commonly used to measure image sizes.
Plug-in— A piece of software that enhances an existing application by adding a new function.
Podcast— An audio recording, much like a radio show, that can be downloaded from the Internet.
Post— Any addition to a blog or a microblog. A blog is a website and each new article added to the blog is a post.
RSS feed— A system that delivers the content from chosen websites or blogs to a user every time the content is updated.
Screenshot— An image capture of the user’s computer display or a part of the computer display.
Sidebar— Boxes with text content and links that appear on either side of the main text area of a blog.
Smartphone, Tablet, Phablet— A smartphone is a small, portable computer with Internet access and the capability of making phone calls. A tablet is a small, portable computer—most commonly about 7 inches wide and 10 inches high—roughly the size and thickness of a small pad of paper. A phablet is a portable computer, larger than a smartphone but smaller than a tablet, that combines the functions of the two.
Spam— Unwanted emails or comments, usually trying to sell something, sent to very large numbers of Internet users. Spam is the Internet version of junk mail. In a blog, spam can frequently appear in the comments section.
Spambots— A computer program designed to “harvest” email, website, and blog addresses, and automatically send spam to those places.
Stream— To send audio or video content over the Internet so it can be consumed by users in real time. For example, consumers can either download a podcast, which will take up memory space on their computers or mobiles, or they can stream the podcast and listen to it without downloading it.
Subhed— Small headlines placed at intervals through the text of an article, often but not always in the same typeface and size as the text. Also known as “chapter breaks.”
Template— Pre-designed websites and web pages made available to users of blogging platforms so users will not have to design their websites and page from scratch.
Tumblelog— Originally, a blog composed of short posts in various media: sentences, quotations, images, videos, and links. Now, tumblelog refers to a blog on the Tumblr platform, and a blog composed of short posts in various media is called a microblog.
Tweet— A single post, no more than 140 characters, on Twitter. Twitter automatically shortens long URLs to 20 characters.
Twitterverse— Like the blogosphere, the Twitterverse is the universe of all posts made on Twitter and all Twitter users. According to Twitter, the social network has 284 million “monthly active users.”
Typeface, Font— A typeface is an entire set of characters—letters of the alphabet, numerals, and symbols—of the same design. Times New Roman, Helvetica, Courier, and Veranda are popular typefaces. A font is all the characters of a typeface in one size and one style. For example: Courier is a typeface, and Courier Bold 12-point is a font.
URL— Abbreviation for uniform resource locator, more commonly known as a “web address.” For example, the URL for the University of Alabama is http://www.ua.edu and the URL for the University of Alabama Libraries is http://www.ua.edu/libraries.html.
Vlog— A blog whose content is videos.