Blogging Glossary

Before we get too far, let’s take a look at some blog lingo.

• Post — a blog entry; also verb, to create a blog entry
• Blogging — the act of posting
• Blogger — a person who blogs
• Blogosphere — the blogging community
• RSS Feed — short for Real Simple Syndication, it’s a way for others to sign up (called subscribing; see below) to get updates from your blog without having to visit it
• Atom — a feed format that is an alternative to RSS
• Blog Client — software installed on your computer that you can use to manage (post, edit) blogs with no need to launch a web browser
• Blogroll — a list of other blogs that a blogger recommends by providing links to them
• Comment Spam — similar to e-mail spam, unwanted comments posted by robot “spambots”
• Mommy bloggers — a particularly cohesive and active group of blogging mothers — see the discussion of the Motrin mommy blogger revolt in the Social Media Hall of Shame
• Permalink — a permanent, unchanging link to a single post that can be used when you want to link to a post from elsewhere
• Podcasting — originally a contraction of “iPod” and “broadcasting,” podcasting means posting audio or video material on a blog and its RSS feed, for digital players (not just iPods).
• Subscribe — signing up to be alerted to changes in a blog, or signing up to receive an RSS feed
• Templates — the organization structure of a blog page often including content placement, design, graphics, and interactive features; you can find free templates, commercial templates, or have your own designed
• Theme — a particular look that can be applied to a blog template, changing the visual elements
• Trackback or Pingback — a ping that a blog sends to another blog to notify that their article has been mentioned
• Tag cloud — Displaying lists of keywords or tags in a blog as a cloud of words
• Plug-ins — bits of interactivity that can add improved functionality and new features to your blog
• Jump — the continuation of a story on another page

Blogs can be plain or they can be fancy. But most blogs have one or more of the following components:

• Index page — The front page, which may contain teasers to other posts
• Header — The topmost part of the blog
• Footer — The bottom part of the blog
• Sidebar — Columns along one or both sides of the blog’s main page
• Categories — A collection of topic-specific posts
• Comments — A section, generally at the bottom, where readers can leave remarks
• CAPTCHA — Those squiggly words often seen in a Comments section to prevent automated commenting, it stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart
• Tagging — Allows readers or bloggers to attach keywords to make it easier to search or collect similar posts
• BlogThis — An interactive feature that allows a visiting blogger to blog on their own blog about the entry they are reading
• Plug-ins — Interactive features that add improved functionality and new features. Some top plug-ins for the popular blogging platform WordPress include: Subscribe To Comments, Show Top Commentators, Get Recent Comments, Popularity Contest, and Share This.[1]