Visit the Glossary if we use any terms that you do not understand. Certain links throughout the site are actually links to the Glossary. If you place your mouse over such a link, you will see a message in the status bar telling you that this is link to the glossary.

This is not a full glossary of every techie term, just the ones we use on this site.

GEEK
HTML
KISS
GB/MB/KB
RAM
SOURCE CODE
UPLOAD
URL

GEEK :

Silly Internet term. Person who is so wrapped up in something they talk of nothing else; an anorak; Techno Trainspotter. (Sorry all trainspotters.)

HTML :

Hyper Text Markup Language. The source code in which web pages are written. Here is the code for the FeedBack Home link (just below), with a litle bit of Javascript thrown in for good measure.
<A HREF="index.htm" onMouseOver="return statustext('FeedBack Software´s Home Page')" onMouseOut="return statustext('FeedBack Software')" >FeedBack Home<A>  
FeedBack Home  

KISS :

Keep It Simple, Stupid. Why over complicate something when keeping it simple would be less confusing?

GB/MB/KB :

Giga Bytes, Mega Bytes, Kilo Bytes.
Size of information on computer. Your hard drive might have a capacity of 10 GB.
One simple text file (or webpage) might take up 3 Kbytes, whereas a picture might take up 100KB.
The Feedback Software Text & Logo at the top of this page is 21 KB in size.
One Giga Byte=1024 MBytes, one MB=1024 KBytes, one KByte=1024 bytes.
So where does the 1024 come in, rather than 1000? Well, it's all because of the powers of two. 2 to the power of 10 is 1024. If we look at these powers:- 2,4,8,16,32,64,128,256,512,1024, you can see where the common figures of 64 or 128 Mbyte of Ram come from. Also processors follow this, first 8 bit, then 16 bit, now 32 bit, soon more....

RAM :

Random Access Memory. Can be compared with a post office's pigeon holes. The more (or bigger) holes, the more letters you can sort at one time.
The more memory you have, the more things you can do, and the faster you can do them. Depending what you want your computer to do, 32 Mbyte of Ram is an absolute minimum these days, with 64 being better, 128 or 256 the norm. Hi end machines may have 1 Gigabyte of Ram or more!.
Full blown video editing takes lots, whereas simple text processing takes just a little.

SOURCE CODE :

A text file containing a list of instructions. Source code can be written in many languages, such as C, C++ and C#, Basic, Vbasic, Forth, Pascal, Cobol, Java etc.
In some languages, such as C++, a compiler and linker converts this code to an executable program that can be run, whilst in others the program is 'interpreted' at run time. (Javascript, as seen in HTML Web Pages, is such a language.)

UPLOAD :

To send files to another computer. Uploading means to connect to another computer and transfer files on your computer to this other machine. This is the way that you can put your site onto the internet. The usual method is FTP - File Transfer Protocol. There are various programs avilable to make this file transfer a very simple drag and drop operation - just like using Windows Explorer.
Our Weather Software  has a feature that allows files to be FTP´ed to you site automatically.

URL :

Uniform Resource Locator. The address of a web site ie www.bbc.co.uk/eastenders. This site's URL is www.feedsoftclara.co.uk.
This is actually just an easy to remember version of a load of numbers - the IP address, ie 192.95.122.334. When you enter a domain name into your browser, it dashes of to the Domain Name Server (DNS - Ever seen the message DNS Lookup Failure?), looks it up in a big database, gets the true IP address for that domain, and sends you there. Mostly.