Literature & Weblogs By J. Selva [home]
By. J. Selva - Valencia - Año 2005

DEFINITIONS

The terminology, like the field, is developing quickly and in a number of directions. As Sarah Boland writes: “it’s difficult to describe digital / new media writing as it’s in a constant state of flux”

GLOSSARY OF TERMS FOR BLOGGING

This is a selection of definitions of technical terms used in blogs, blogs servers instructions or terms referred in the usual practice. Though most of the terms are taken from the glossary of WordPress, other have been added by myself and some content changed to be adapted for the purposes of this list.

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Blog

A blog, or weblog, is an online journal, diary, or serial published by a person or group of people.

Blogs are typically used by individuals or peer groups, but are occasionally used by companies or organizations as well. In the corporate arena, the only adopters of the blog format so far have tended to be design firms, web media companies, and other "bleeding edge" tech firms.

Blogs often contain public as well as private content. Depending on the functionality of the CMS software that is used, some authors may restrict access — through the use of accounts or passwords — to content that is too personal to be published publicly.

Blog” is a verb as well as a noun. I could say, “I’m blogging this,” meaning that I am writing about it for my blog, but fortunately I wrote my talk out in advance so I do not need to blog it now.

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Blogging

Blogging is the act of writing in one's blog. To blog something is to write about something in one's blog. This usually involves linking (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlink) to something the author finds interesting on the internet.

See also: blogosphere, blogroll

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Blogosphere

The blogosphere is the subset of internet web sites which are, or relate to, blogs.

See also: blog, blogroll

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Blogroll

A blogroll is a list of links to various blogs or news sites. Often a blogroll is "rolled" by a service which tracks updates (using feeds) to each site in the list, and provides the list in a form which aggregates update information.

See also: blog, blogosphere, feed, news reader

External links: News aggregator at Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_aggregator)

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CSS

CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, is a W3C (http://www.w3.org/) open standards (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard) programming language for specifying how a web page is presented. It allows web site designers to create formatting and layout for a web site independently of its content.

External links: CSS at W3C (http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/), Open standards at Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard), W3C.org (http://www.w3.org/)

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Excerpt

An excerpt is a condensed description of your blog post and refers to the summary entered in the Excerpt field of the editing panel. The excerpt is used to describe your post in RSS feeds and is typically used in displaying search results. The excerpt is sometimes used in displaying the Archives and Category views of your posts.

An excerpt should not be confused with the teaser which refers to the first few sentences or paragraphs of a post. When typing a long post you can insert the <!--more--> Quicktag after a few sentences to act as a cut-off point. When the post is displayed, the teaser, followed by a hyperlink (such as Read the rest of this entry...), are displayed. Your visitor can then click on that link to see the full version of your post.

 

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Feed

A feed is a function of special software that allows "Feedreaders" to access a site automatically looking for new content and then posting the information about new content and updates to another site. This provides a way for users to keep up with the latest and hottest information posted on different blogging sites. Some Feeds include RSS (alternately defined as "Rich Site Summary" or "Really Simple Syndication"), Atom or RDF files. Dave Shea, author of the web design weblog Mezzoblue (http://mezzoblue.com) has written a comprehensive summary (http://www.mezzoblue.com/archives/2004/05/19/what_is_rssx/) of feeds.

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Moblogging

Moblogging is the act of posting to one's blog via a mobile device, e.g. mobile phone, smartphone, or Blackberry. It is pronounced as mob?-logging or mob-logging, or sometimes as mob-logging in reference to smart mobs.

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mod_rewrite

mod_rewrite is an extension module of the Apache web server software which allows for "rewriting" of URLs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Url) on-the-fly. Rewrite rules use regular expressions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression) to parse the requested URL from the client, and translate it into a different URL before interpretation.

 

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MUDs

MUDs (standing for "Multiple-user Domain") are both synchtonous and hypertext forms of communication. The synchronous component allows users to interact in "real-time". soomewhat like holding a conversation in a room. Synchronous communication such Internet Relay Chat differ from asynchronous forms such usenet newsgroups, mailing list, electronic bulletin boards, in which messages have a kind of permanence, somewhat like posters pasted on walls.

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News reader

A news aggregator or news reader is a computer program which tracks syndicated information feeds, via RSS, RDF, or Atom. Most news aggregators allow one to 'subscribe' to a feed, and automatically keep track of the articles one has read, similar to an email client tracking read emails.

Many blogs make their content available in feed form for the convenience of readers using news aggregators. WordPress can generate feeds in RSS and/or Atom formats.

External links: News aggregator at Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_aggregator)

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Page

A Page is often used to present "static" information about yourself or your site. A good example of a Page is information you would place on an About Page. A Page should not be confused with the time-oriented objects called posts. Pages are typically "timeless" in nature and live "outside" your blog.

The word "page" has long been used to describe any HTML document on the web. In WordPress, however, "Page" refers to a very specific feature first introduced in WordPress version 1.5.

 

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Perl

Perl is an acronym for Practical Extraction and Report Language, but it's most commonly spelled as a proper name. It's a very popular and powerful scripting language used for web applications, although its use is being largely replaced by PHP in the mainstream. One of its strengths lies in its speedy and effective use of regular expressions 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression)
.
Its unofficial motto is, "There's More Than One Way To Do It," or "TMTOWTDI," owing to the extreme flexibility of the syntax.

WordPress does not use Perl, and it is therefore not required.

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Permalink

A permalink is a URL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Url) at which a resource or article will be permanently stored. Many pages driven by Content Management Systems contain excerpts of content which is frequently rotated, making linking to bits of information within them a game of chance. Permalinks allow users to bookmark full articles at a URL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Url) they know will never change, and will always present the same content.

Permalinks are optional in WordPress, but are highly recommended as they greatly increase the cleanliness of URL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Url). WordPress uses the Apache module mod_rewrite to implement its permalink system.

External links: URL at Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Url)

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PHP

PHP is a recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. It is a popular server-side scripting language designed specifically for integration with HTML, and is used (often in conjunction with MySQL) in Content Management Systems and other web applications. It is available on many platforms, including Windows, Unix/Linux and Mac OS X, and is open source (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source) software.

WordPress is written using PHP and requires it for operation.

External links: PHP Website (http://php.net/), PHP for Designers (http://www.digital-web.com/articles/php_for_designers/) — by WordPress lead developer Matthew Mullenweg, PHP at OnLAMP (http://onlamp.com/php/)

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Post

An individual entry of content into a blog, or the act of uploading a new piece of content to the live blog site. Posts can be edited after they are published, if necessary or desired.

See also: page

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Post Slug

A word or two describing an entry, for use in permalinks (replaces the %posttitle% field therein), especially useful if titles tend to be long or they change frequently.

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RDF

Resource Description Framework. A language used to describe the locations of resources on the web. WordPress can produce output in RDF format that describes the locations of posts. Like RSS, RDF is used for content syndication.

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RSS

RDF Site Summary. A format for syndicating content on news-like sites viewable by RSS-aware programs called news aggregators.

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Tagline

A tagline is a catchy phrase that describes the character or the attributes of the blog in a brief, concise manner. Think of it as the slogan, or catchline for a weblog.

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XML icon

The XML icon is a graphical representation of the syndicate this site link. It points to the actual RDF or XML file that can be used for syndication. This is found on most sites that run syndicated weblogs.

 

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Wiki

wikis are server programs that allow multiple users to contribute to a Web site


 

This is the web paper for class: Literature and Hypertext.
Student: Joaquín Selva Pérez . UNIVERSITY OF VALENCIA. FACULTY OF LANGUAGUES (2005)