The terms are explained in the simplest way without any attempt to be scientifically right or complete. It's just to give you an idea of what it means to start with.
| Affiliate/Associate program | Selling products or services for another in exchange for a commission. |
| ASCII | Totally unformatted text without ANY make-up characters (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), also called plain text. |
| Autoresponder | Little program that automatically sends a Email text upon reception of a request. Also known as Email-on-demand or Email-on-request. |
| Blog | A web journal, mostly containing short posts. Posting to it is called blogging and the owner is a blogger. You can also give your comment on most blogs. |
| BTW | Internet geek speak for By The Way. |
| Browser | Program that loads and views web pages. (Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer) |
| Byte | The disk space that 1 character takes. |
| CGI (scripts) | Special, technical programs used on a special place within your web site to interact with your visitors |
| cgi-bin | That's the special place within your web site where your cgi scripts reside |
| cookie | Little piece of flat text that is written to your hard disk by the browser (where you can switch off writing cookies). It's readable, so next time you visit the site that set the cookie, they can recognize you. Often used to detect affiliate codes. |
| CSS | Cascading Style Sheet. A seperate part of a web page where you can specify the appearance of text and other elements. Can also be placed in a seperate file that is called from within the web page. |
| DNS | Domain Name System. A huge table that translates Internet domain names into IP numbers (after all, we are numbers, aren't we). A DNS Server performs this kind of translation. |
| Domain name | Your unique 'website name' in your URL that identifies your website. |
| Download | Transferring information FROM the Internet to your computer. |
| Short for Electronic Mail. For sending and receiving messages over the Internet. | |
| Email client | Program you need to send and receive electronic messages (email). |
| Ezine | The Electronic version of a magaZine. Also called newsletter. |
| FAQ | Internet geek speak for Frequently Asked Questions. |
| Feed (reader) | Special mark up language to transmit information easily. Can be read using a feed reader. Most commonly used in blogs, where you can subscribe to their feeds. |
| Forum | Meeting place on a web site discussing certain topics by reading posted messages and responding to them. |
| FTP | File Transport Protocol, the technical procedure to transfer files (from your hard disk to your host vice versa) |
| FTP program | Program to transfer (FTP) files from your computer to another (host) vice versa. |
| GIF | Graphic Interchange Format. A common format for image files, especially suitable for images containing large areas of the same color. |
| Giga byte/Gig/G | 1024 Megabytes. A measure for disk space. |
| Host (Web host) | The company that has your web site available on their computer 24 hours a day (if it's a good one). |
| (X)HTML | HyperText Markup Language, a simple language to make web pages so browsers know how to display them |
| http | HyperText Transfer Protocol. The protocol used to transfer hypertextfiles (webpages) across the Internet |
| IMHO | Internet geek speak for In My Humble Opinion |
| Internet | A vast, detailed worldwide network of connected computers used to exchange information. |
| IP (number) | A unique number that uniquely identifies every computer connected to the Internet. Consists of 4 parts separated by dots, e.g. 214.112.345.2 |
| ISP | Internet Service Provider; the company that provides you access to the Internet. |
| Java (scripts) | Special, technical language used in your web pages to interact with your visitors. Your browser has to cope with Javascript, so it eats up your pc memory |
| JPG/JPEG | A format for image files. JPEG format is preferred to the GIF format for photographic images or images using lots of different colors |
| Keywords | Specific words or phrases within your web pages, which you think web surfers will use to find you. |
| Kilobyte | 1024 bytes. A measure for disk space. |
| Link (Hyperlink) | An underlined piece of text or a graphic that takes you to another part of the web. |
| Megabyte/M | 1024 kilobytes. A measure for disk space. |
| meta tag | HTML tag that contains information about the page itself, hence the name ("meta" means "about this subject") |
| Newsletter | Periodical to update you about the latest and greatest on a topic. |
| Open Source | Software programming code that is available to anyone so that you may read, change or re-build it. |
| Portable Document Format. Another way of formatting documents, but this one is not related to any operating system (Windows, Mac, Unix). | |
| PDF Reader | The software program that you'll need to read PDF files. |
| PHP | A programming language used as part of the HTML in a web page. The code is executed on the server where the page resides on. |
| RSS | Really Simple Syndication. A protocol for syndication and sharing of content, often used by blogs to create a feed, so that you can read the posts in a Feed Reader. |
| Search Engines | Web sites that people use to find what they are looking for. |
| SEO | Search Engine Optimization. The act of optimizing web pages to list high in the search engines. |
| Server | A computer or software program, that provides the services asked for, like a web server provides the webpage you asked for in your browser or a mail server that handles email requests initiated by your email program. |
| SMTP | The protocol used to send electronic mail from server to server on the Internet. |
| Spam | Sending of commercial mail to people that didn't ask for it. Also known as UCE (Unsollicited Commercial Email). |
| SQL | Structured Query Language. A special language to query databases. |
| Upload | Transferring data from your computer to the Internet. That's what you do when you 'upload' your pages to your host. |
| USP | Unique Selling Proposition, a unique aspect of your business that separates you from your competitors. |
| URL/URI | Uniform Resource Locator/Uniform Resource Identifier. An address for an Internet resource. |
| VOIP | Voice Over IP. Technology to make telephone calls over IP networks, especially the Internet. Did you know it was free? Try Skype! |
| WWW | World Wide Web, the part of the Internet that contains the web sites. |
