Despite the rather ugly sound, blogs have become very popular.

So where did the crazy name come from? Back in the early days of the net, some daring pioneers began journaling online. The term ‘web log’ or ‘weblog’ was coined to describe the new journal or diary type website. Somewhere along the way the space was moved and ‘web log’ became ‘we blog’. Whether it was a typo or intentional is unknown – but the change stuck and blogging was born.

In many ways blogs are like having your own editorial column in your own private newspaper. They can be about whatever you want them to be about. Some stick to a narrow topic, some are all over the place.

As a general rule, blogs are update daily with a new ‘post’ (article, editorial) each day. The posts are usually listed in reverse chronological order. Many blogs are now adding categories or tags to give the reader alternative ways to search and display the content.

Search engines are constantly looking for new content to add to their index. Blogs that get updated frequently get revisited and reindexed frequently.

Ah ha! An easy little article, I thought. A cheat sheet for newbies. I’ll just look up what comes after terabyte and whip a quick article together.

How wrong I was.

Megs & Gigs

The prefix part is pretty straightforward. The kilo, mega, giga, etc. comes from the standardized SI naming scheme. SI is the International System of Units (from the French Le Système International d’Unités) and was adopted in 1960. In the U.S. school systems it was often called the metric system.

The confusion comes when applying SI prefixes to computer measurements.

Bits & Bytes

The most basic piece of computer data is a bit. Think of it as a switch. It’s off or on. A zero or a one.

Obviously a single bit doesn’t give you a lot of data – on/off, yes/no, true/false. So they grouped bits together and called them bytes. It is theoretically possible to vary the number of bit per byte, but all personal computer on the market now use 8 bits per byte. Eight bits grouped together gives you 256 possible combinations – enough to code any character used in the West.

Kilobytes & Kibibytes

Because all those little switches have only two states – off or on – a lot of computer measurements are powers of 2. Base 2 if you remember your math.

At some point, someone decided that 2¹⁰ equals 1024 and that is almost 1000 so let’s call it a kilobyte. And when we have 1024 kilobytes we’ll call if a megabyte, etc. on up the SI list.

And that is where the trouble started. The average user – like you and me – used the SI definitions. A kilo means 1000 – not 1024. Even computer manufacturers were confused – sometimes a megabyte was 1,000,000 bytes and sometimes it was 1,048,576 bytes. As the numbers got bigger so did the differences.

Confusion reigned and lawsuits were filed. “If you are going to call it a kilo, then it should be 1000. If you want to measure in 1024, then call it something else” said users.

So they did. They took the first two letters from the SI list and added bi (for binary) and byte.

The new naming scheme is still in the process of being adopted and standardized. Your computer may be measuring in kibibytes and still calling them kilobytes.

Oookay! You are thinking. That helped a lot. What to heck is HyperText Mark-up Language.

html is the code (or language) that tells your browser how to display a page – paragraph breaks, fonts, tables, forms, images, etc. If you ever look at the source code for a web page it is the stuff between the angle brackets <>. That’s the Mark-up part.

HyperText is the geeky way of saying there are links to other documents.

Do you need to learn it to run your website?

No. Not the code part anyway.

There are lots and lots of programs out there that will write the code for you. In fact, many of the programs you already use may be using html or have an option to save as html.

html is now the most common way to transfer information – between people or between different programs on your computer.

• Just let it die. When the domain name and hosting expire, that’s it. It’s gone. Give a little sigh of relief.
• Sell the domain name to someone who wants it and let them revamp and re-pupose the site. Some people claim you can actual make a few bucks. Good luck! Hope you have a really good domain name.
• Find a new mission for it yourself and start over.

I’m starting over.

I’m revamping this site as well as a couple of others. And I have plans – or maybe dreams would be a better word – for some new sites.

This will be the chronicle of the journey. What works and what doesn’t. What it really takes to get a website up and running. Interspersed with some basic computing tips – cuz how ya gonna run a website without a computer??