Glossary

Here are definitions for many of the common terms used in discussing blogs, bloggers, and blogging.
 

Archives
The home page of a weblog displays current items, perhaps the last 10 posts or the last 7 days. Eventually these items will scroll off the home page, and will be permanently stored on an archive page.

Blog 
“A weblog is a hierarchy of text, images, media objects and data, arranged chronologically, that can be viewed in an HTML browser.” Source: Harvard Weblogs

Blogger 
A person who keeps or contributes to a blog.

Blogging 
The activity of updating a blog.

Blogroll  
A list of links to sites that the author thinks are related or useful.

Categories  
Posts can be assigned to relevant categories for easier navigation.

Client 
A device that allows you to create or read content which is uploaded or downloaded from a server. Examples include personal computers and mobile devices like PDAs and mobile phones.

Comments 
A key difference between blogs and typical web sites is that readers can add comments and responses to the author, for other visitors to see.

Entry 
see Post.

Host  
see Server.

Permalinks 
When people point to a specific post, they should link to the archived version, the permanent one, using a permalink. A permalink is often displayed with a pound sign (#).

Ping  
Blogging software can be configured to automatically ping sites like Weblogs.Com or blo.gs when the blog is updated.

Post  
A post is one single item of content published to the blog. It could be text, an image, or a combination of these. Sometimes called an entry.

RSS  
A format for syndicating news and the content of news-like sites. Most blogging software enables the author to offer RSS feeds to easily syndicate or distribute their content. RSS feeds enable people who use news aggregators (such as MyYahoo) to subscribe to the blog. If the blog has categories or departments each may have its own RSS feed.

Server  
The computers where the content for a weblog is published and available for people around the world to access at any time via the Internet. Servers are also known as hosts.

Syndication  
Most blogging software enables the author to offer RSS feeds to easily syndicate or distribute their content. See RSS.

Trackback  
When a post links to a post on another blog that supports Trackback it can ping the other blog to notify it that it has been referred to.

URI  Uniform Resource Identifier is a term very similar in meaning to URL.

URL  Uniform Resource Locator - this is the address of a resource on the Internet. World Wide Web URLs begin with http://

Weblog  see Blog.