Helpful terms

General Computing

  • Byte, Kilobyte, Megabyte,  Gigabyte
    • Examples: A jpg image optimized for the web is perhaps 100 to 400 kilobytes (kb); a high quality digital photo is perhaps 24 megabytes (mb); your computer probably has 500 to 1,000 gigabytes of storage (gb).
  • Unix / Linux – Operating system underlying many computer operating systems and network server systems
  • PC vs Mac – PC means “personal computer” but it’s often used to contrast Windows or Linux systems with Mac systems. Technically, Macs are also “personal computers.”

Networking 

  • Modems – Dial-up (old), DSL,  cable, FIOS (fiber optic service)
  • FTP – File transfer protocol  – upload & download files
  • SSH – Secure Shell – secure text commands
  • URL — Universal resource locator, aka. Domain name
  • Top level domain name (edu, com, org, gov, etc)
  • HTML  code
    • Link:   <a href=”http://somewhere.org”> Link Text </a>
    • Image:  <img src=””http://somewhere.org/rainbow.jpg”>
    • Text formatting (example) <h1> Headlines </h1>
    • Lists (example) <ul> <li> Unordered List item </li>  <li> another unordered list item </li>  </ul>
  • HTTP – hyper text transfer protocol
  • HTTPS – hyper text transfer protocol secure.
  • SMS – Short message service
  • SSL — Secure socket layer (for https / not http )
  • SEO — Search engine optimization
  • Tags in FB, WordPress, html coding
  • Web hosting services (Bluehost, GoDaddy, many others etc)

WordPress and other CMS systems

  • CMS dynamic pages vs HTML static pages
  • Theme – basic style of a site for browser display
  • Mobile phone display –  AMP – Accelerated Mobile Pages
  • Widgets – add-on content modules
  • Plugins  – add-on capabilities
  • Pages vs Posts – In a CMS, a post is a transient front-page bit of information, while a page is intended to be more permanent.
  • Sticky posts & pages – “stick” to the top of the stack
  • Trackback — Author notified of links – AKA Linkback  
  • Tags — simple html code snippets such as “embed tags” for embedding inline audio or video in a WordPress page

Imaging 

  • Pixel – Picture information cell
  • Image mode vs format
    • Modes — Greyscale (black & white, print or web), Indexed (low-res web), RGB (web), CMYK (print)
    • Formats — jpg, gif, png, tiff, (and others)