Blogging Glossary

In our previous post, What is a Blog?, we continued a our series about blogging by answering a simple question: what is a blog?

In this post, we present a glossary of several blogging terms.

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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

Components of a Blog

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]

Next up: Creating Your Blog


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[1] See the list of top WordPress plug-ins at bit.ly/ah4Rg9

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