IT Marketing Terms

Web crawler, aka spider: An Internet bot that systematically scans the Internet. Typically used for indexing on the Internet, but also for automatically collecting data for web archiving.

Web Hosting: Providing a web server where files, instances of CMS and web publishing platforms, and web applications / software can be accessed on the Internet. Some free hosting is usually only available for certain platforms and with limited functionality and advertising. For example, a free yotpo wordpress  site is available through WordPress.com and a free Omeka site is available through omeka.net. The users of this hosting don’t need to manage the servers anyway, so they are easy to use, but in both cases, only some of the platform’s features are available.

Dedicated or managed hosting services rents space on their web servers where customers can store files and install software of their choice. Dedicated hosting requires an annual fee and a certain amount of knowledge to manage. Both the cost and the skills required are reduced. Reclaim Hosting is a service widely used in the US higher education industry, offering hosting from $ 30 / year (2018) and one-click installs of platforms like WordPress, Omeka, and Scalar that handle the most complex aspects of software installation.

Web Mapping: Platforms such as Google Maps that offer online access to geographic data and APIs that allow users to create their own maps. An alternative to GIS widely used in the digital humanities. Open source web map software developed for the humanities includes Neatline (a set of plugins for Omeka) and Palladio.

Web page: A file written in HTML and stored on a web server connected to the Internet.

Web server or server: refers to computers connected to the Internet and software that runs on them that delivers files to the Internet in response to requests from other computers.

Website: A collection of web pages stored on a web server connected to the Internet. Nowadays, websites are usually built using a CMS like WordPress or Omeka, but they can be just a bunch of files written in HTML.

WordPress: An open source content management system originally designed for blogs. WordPress allows you to create pages and posts; pages do not have a publication date and are intended for static content in a fixed location; posts have a published date, they are displayed in reverse chronological order, and can be tagged and categorized. Additional features can be added to your WordPress site by installing plugins.

WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get): Content editing interfaces that display content as it will appear when published. They provide an alternative to interfaces that display tags and the markup language used to display content that way. The classic WordPress editorial interface has a tab for viewing the content as it looks (visual) and a second tab for viewing the markup that created that appearance (text).

XML (Extensible Markup Language): A markup language that uses tags to describe identifiable content: title, author, year, genre, etc. XML files are a form of structured data that can be analyzed computationally.