Glossary of Blog Terms

// January 14th, 2010 // blog

First and foremost, the term blog derives from the word weblog, which is just an online diary of sorts.  The writer(s) are called bloggers and you may have heard the term blogosphere, which just is a collective term encompassing all blogs and their interconnections. Now that you know about bloggers blogging in the blogosphere, on to some specific definitions:

Atom: Another popular feed format developed as an alternative to RSS.
Blogger.com, a free, popular blog hosting web site.
Blogroll: A list of links to other websites or blogs a blogger recommends.
Comments - when a blogger creates a new “post” or journal entry, site visitors have a chance to write a response, or comment, regarding that post or topic.
Comment spam:Like e-mail spam. Robot “spambots” flood a blog with advertising in the form of bogus comments. A serious problem that requires bloggers and blog platforms to have tools to exclude some users or ban some addresses in comments.
Feeds: see RSS Feeds.
Permalink: AKA. Permanent link. The unique URL of a single post. Use this when you want to link directly to a post somewhere instead of linking to your homepage
Pingback: The alert in the TrackBack system that notifies the original poster of a blog post when someone else writes an entry concerning the original post.
Plugin: AKA Plug-in or Plug in.  A module that extends or adds to the basic capabilities of the blog software.
Podcasting: Contraction of “iPod” and “broadcasting” (but not for iPods only). Posting audio and video material on a blog and its RSS feed, for digital players.
Post: An entry written and published to a blog.  Usually presented to the site visitor in reverse chronological order (newest entry first).
Post Slug: For blogs with common language URLs, the post slug is the portion of the URL that represents the post. Example: http://domain.com/2008/01/this-is-the-post-slug
RSS:Really Simple Syndication is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts.
RSS aggregator:Software or online service allowing a blogger to read an RSS feed, especially the latest posts on their favourite blogs. Also called a reader, or feedreader.
RSS feed:The file containing a blog’s latest posts. It is read by an RSS aggregator/reader and shows at once when a blog has been updated. It may contain only the title of the post, the title plus the first few lines of a post, or the entire post.
Subscribe:The term used when a blogs feed is added to their RSS feed reader like Bloglines or Google. Some blogging platforms have internal subscriptions, this allows readers to receive notification when there are new posts in a blog.
Templates:Templates, used on the “back end” of a blog that work together to handle information and present it on a blog.
Theme:CSS based code that when applied to the templates will result in visual element changes to the blog. The theme, as a whole, is also referred to as a blog design.
TrackBack:A system that allows a blogger to see who has seen the original post and has written another entry concerning it. The system works by sending a ‘ping’ between the blogs, and therefore providing the alert.
Weblog: the unshortened version of ‘blog’.
Wordpress: a free, popular, customizable blog software; can be used as a content management system

Leave a Reply