Glossary

Balloons: a way to manipulate the order of how news, galleries, and blurbs are displaying on your website. Adding a balloon raises an entry beyond the default ranking (which is normally chronological). Removing (“popping”) a balloon lowers the ranking or returns it to the default.

Content Management System (CMS): software to help you manage your website without knowing too much about HTML or other technical languages that the Web is built on. Lewis & Clark has several content management systems, the largest of which is LiveWhale.

Blurbs: one of the ways (along with Pages, Events, Galleries, and News Stories) to publish content on your website. Short statements that have no headlines. Can be used for a chronological stream of content similar to Twitter, or non-chronologically for a list of items or an “item of the day” system. This glossary for example is made from blurbs.

Dynamic and Static Content: two types of website content. Static content does not change unless you log into LiveWhale and manually edit it. Dynamic content can automatically update using a LiveWhale Widget. For instance, many department and program pages at Lewis & Clark have homepage “news” and “events” boxes, which contain Widgets that automatically update the page when you add news or events.

Events: one of the ways (along with Pages, News Stories, Galleries, and Blurbs) to publish content on your website. Each item added to Events is chronologically based, connecting directly to both your own group’s calendar as well as Lewis & Clark’s central web calendar. (Note: space must be reserved separately.)

Forms: a way to collect information from your website’s viewers. A survey, a questionnaire, a sign-up sheet, and so on, that can be embedded on any of your pages. Managed here: https://www.lclark.edu/livewhale/?forms

Galleries: one of the ways (along with Pages, Events, News Stories, and Blurbs) to publish content on your website. A collection of images. You can control the order and add captions via the control screen: https://www.lclark.edu/livewhale/?galleries

Live and Hidden: whether or not to display to the public an entry in LiveWhale. This includes news, galleries, events, files, forms, and blurbs. Hidden entries can only be viewed if you log into LiveWhale and go to the control panel.  Live entries will be viewable by anyone visiting pages on your site that are using applicable Widgets.

LiveWhale Groups: membership in groups determines who can edit areas of the website. Groups can correspond to departments, offices, etc., and people can be members of more than one group. For example, someone who wants to edit the English department’s news or pages would need to be in that group to do so.

LiveWhale: a content management system (CMS) that helps us maintain most of the Lewis & Clark website. Though we in New Media have customized some parts of LiveWhale, it is mostly a third-party software from a company called White Whale Web Services. Several times a year they upgrade significant sections of LiveWhale, improving it based on our own direct feedback to them.

Log in: The process of identifying oneself to LiveWhale, by entering the same username and password as your lclark email. Once logged in, you can edit or add new content to your website.

New Media: a team within Public Affairs and Communications, making and managing websites and web applications for Lewis & Clark, like this very website, the search engine, the Source, the LiveWhale software, and more. We are here to answer your questions!

News: one of the ways (along with Pages, Events, Galleries, and Blurbs) to publish content on your website. It need not have anything to do with “news,” as this is merely a tool to publish one piece of content in multiple places.

News Manager: the section of the LiveWhale control panel where you can add and edit your news stories. It is located here: https://www.lclark.edu/livewhale/?news

Pages: one of the ways (along with News Stories, Events, Galleries, and Blurbs) to publish content on your website. Static content, but can have dynamic LiveWhale Widgets embedded in them. Manage them here: https://www.lclark.edu/livewhale/?pages_browse

Suggestion: an option that encourages sharing entries (news, events, etc.) throughout the Lewis & Clark website. You can share content from your group to other relevant groups or accept suggestions sent by others. Sharing content in this way helps drive traffic throughout the website and allows you to easily update your site with new stories for frequent visitors, prospective students, alumni, and donors.

Summary: a condensed version of fuller news story or event description. The summary may appear on news or events pages and should include basic information. The full text of your post should go into the body field (or in the document itself in Files).

Screencast: a digital recording of computer screen output, also known as a video screen capture.

Tag: a keyword or phrase that you can add to your LiveWhale content (news, events, pages, etc.) to help categorize and filter it.

Widgets: a way to add dynamic (automatically updated) content to your website. They are maintained at your group’s Widget Library – https://www.lclark.edu/livewhale/?widgets – and can be embedded into any page, news story, event, or blurb. 

WYSIWYG: an acronym for “what you see is what you get.” The term is used for the LiveWhale editing toolbars to describe how content is displayed very similarly to the way it will look once you save the page, new story, etc.