The Official Home of Lynn T. Harrison

Some of the terms I use that may require explanation for the uninitiated.

• API                          Application Programming Interface – the interface defined to allow one application to talk with another
• Autoresponder  An automated system that sends a pre-determined series of emails to someone who enrolls into an email list.  A few companies that provides this service are Aweber, Constant Contact and MailChimp.
• back-end               Refers to software that runs on a remote server rather than on the user’s computer
• Client                      Software that runs on the user’s computer.  For web sites this would be the user’s browser (IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, etc.)
• CMS                         Content Management System – a style of website that separates the informational content (stored in a database) from the visual presentation
• CSS                           Cascading Style Sheets – files that specify how sections of a web page are laid out including fonts , placement and colors
• JavaScript            A web page scripting language that runs on the client side within the user’s browser
• PHP                         An open source scripting language popular on many of todays web sites.  The scripts run on the web site’s server
• Plug-in                   A software package designed as an add-on to another piece of software.  Thousands of plug-ins are available for WordPress.  Most of them a free!
• Theme                    A package of scripts and CSS that define how information is presented for a WordPress web site.  This site uses the Socrates theme.
• WordPress           A CMS package written in PHP with a MySQL database back-end.  This website uses WordPress.
• Zip                           A compressed file holding one or more other files.  named after the .ZIP extension placed on the file
• Zipping                  The act of creating a zip file