Whether you’re a blogger or the administrator of a site or CMS account, there is a certain level of vernacular you will be expected to know before you move on to the next level of your career or enterprise. You may be responsible for aggregating hosting reviews or simply tracking a site’s pingbacks. Regardless of the extent of everyday acumen, make sure you are comfortable speaking about the following terms and can use them in a sentence:

Dashboard—It’s hard to imagine that you’ve created a blog, let alone added content or media, without knowing what a dashboard is. But in case you’ve just forgotten the terminology, the dashboard is the virtual control room for your blogging or business info. It’s essentially a screen that summarizes pertinent data and administrative widgets being used in order to run your blog. This can include pingbacks, traffic, metrics, media, comments, and more.

MySQL—An open source database management tool that allows you to store information about posts, comments, media, and metadata. MySQL is a main element of the web application portfolio, LAMP, which includes Linux, Apache, Perl, PHP, and Python. The SQL stands for Structured Query Language.

RSS—Acronym for ‘Really Simple Syndication’, you’ve probably heard of an RSS but maybe have never integrated one into your blog. An RSS feed allows you to automate the distribution of your material, whether it’s video, podcast, pictures, or text. An RSS is typically subscribed to, allowing the person to be updated whenever new content is available. It’s the blog equivalent of a magazine subscription.

AJAX—A technique used to create web development applications for sending and retrieving data. AJAX involves a series of interrelated technologies, including HTML, CSS, XML, XSLT, JavaScript, and Document Object Model (DOM, a platform-independent interface). Combined, these technologies allows for asynchronous information exchange.

Apache—This is an open source HTTP web server software that works extremely well on WordPress and is credited with helping the Internet develop considerably. Apache helps to construct multiple architectures, depending on system requirements, and supports Perl, Python, TCL, and PHP.

Permalink—A URL at which a file or blog can be permanently stored even after it has passed from the front page of a site or blog. Typical in most CMSs now, this is a way to ensure that years from now when you’re referring a reader, client, employer, or customer to a particular page you can be confident they won’t be greeted with a ‘page not found.’

Some of these terms are difficult to speak about meaningfully unless you have extensive technical training. But simply knowing the basic premise of how they affect content management systems and the structure of the Internet as a whole will help you evolve in your role as admin or blogger.