[Originally posted at The Asylum at http://asylum.cid.com/asylum.html. The Asylum, however, is no more (although its original creator is still lurking there). The term Link Rot was contributed by me to the original Asylum list.]

The Websurfer's Handbook

The Web-To-English Dictionary

• 007 n. The act of screwing up the permissions of one's home page files and/or directories disallowing web visitors. (What, no access today - did I pull a 007?)
• Arachnerd n. Someone who spends way too much time weaving and climbing around in the web. (If you've found this page, you probably are an arachnerd.
• Barney page n. Site or page designed only to capitalize on the current popularity of a subject on the Net. (The O.J. jokes page is just another barney page.)
• Century-21er n. A page whose contents have moved and now only contains a link to the new location. (The old MTV is the most famous Century 21er around.)
• Chicken page n. Serious home page which is separated from more frivolous pages setup by the same person. (There are no links between his silly pages back to his chicken page.)
• Cyberbia n. A region of cyberspace inhabited by clueless random people who only browse. Many are Republicans in real life.
• Cyberlinguidiot n. A marketing executive that adds techie prefixes (like cyber) to words to make them sound hi tech.
• Cybervangelist n. One who puts the invention of WWW somewhere between the invention of printing and the invention of writing in terms of significance as an invention. (Most cybervangelists lose their utopian hopes and dreams for the web when they see the popularity of The Asylum.)
• Dirt road n. An unusually slow link. (That page took forever to load, the server must be on a dirt road.)
• Footless adj. Descriptive of one who jumps from site to site so much that a hotlist is completely out of the question. (To run footless is to delete global-history on login.)
• Flooded adj. A page which is unreadable because of a Netscape-enhanced background.
• Furrball n. Commercial site, especially a site which prominently displays an access count to promote business. (I can't believe that furrball claims 200,000 accesses daily.)
• GIF raff n. Too many lame GIFs, like repeated images. (Great site once you get past the GIF raff.)
• Greenlinking v. Using the web for monetary gain. n. greenlinker (As more big companies get on the web, even the best of the web purists will become greenlinkers.)
• Hit'n'run page n. A page with a lot of nude women that has a average hit rate of 30000 per hour which dissappears within a week because of angry and frustrated sysadmins.
• Hotpotato n. the English pronunciation of "http://"
• Hofstadter link n. A link on a page to a slightly-different version of itself. A recursive link. (One way to increase the old access count is to include a lot of Hofstadter links.)
• JPIG n. Site or page containing a large number of inline images which drastically increase loading time. (Turn off image loading for Megadeth, Arizona, that page is a real JPIG.)
• Link rot n. A disease that tends to afflict aging web pages, especially if they are left untended. (You can tell it's a really old page by all the link rot.)
• Love My Carpet n. A site that uses dark, busy background gifs and light text which makes all the words completely illegible.
• Metavoid n. A page that makes excuses for itself by stating "this page is under construction." (Super-metavoids claim to be permanently under construction.)
• One-link wonder n. Site or page containing only a single useful link. (After all the hype, Metaverse turned out to be only a one-link wonder.)
• Ossarac n. A link that you go to a lot, but don't put on your hotlist out of embarassment. (The infobot should really get more links to the 17th floor if people really kept all their Ossaracs on their hotlist.)
• Pimples n. Describes web denizens of a certain age. (The web gets slow when school is out because of all the pimples on line.)
• Pre-Ossarac n. A link that you put on your hotlist for the sole reason that it contains a link to an ossarac. (One of the reasons the big hotlist maintainers on the web are so popular is that they are used as pre-Ossaracs by people whose hotlist are readable by their co-workers.)
• Rental n. A page that pretty much sucks; mostly lame but still has entertainment value. (You wouldn't go see it in a theatre, it's a rental.)
• Roadblock n. A web page who's sole purpose is to let you know that there is nothing available at this URL, but something will be coming soon.
• Rotten orange n. A site that has more than one link to anything OJ related.
• Rte. 404 n. The path to some of coolest hyperlinks. (Click here to enter a contest to win a date with Claudia Schiffer!!)
• Sink back v. To retrace steps required to get to a favorite site when you accidentaly toast your hotlist. (I crashed before I could save the URL, so I had to sink back to NCSA What's New.)
• Spinner n. A link that is slow-loading. Derived from the fact that when one accesses such a link using Mosaic, the only sign of action is the spinning globe. (Many JPIGS are also spinners.)
• Spontaneous combustion n. Flaming without provocation.
• Sundowning v. Changing one's daily sleep schedule to coincide with being awake when the the load on the network is low. (I saw the sun for the first time since I stopped sundowning.)
• Tag 1. n. A link posted by a user to his own pages. 2. v. To post a link on a page, especially for advertising. (Did you tag that guestlist in Japan?)
• Triple-dub n. A handy shortcut for saying many URL's outloud ( Say "triple-dub dot galcit dot caltech dot edu," instead of "double-yew double-yew double-yew dot galcit ...") see also hotpotato.
• Ubiquilink n. A link found on almost everyone's hotlist. (You can tell a homepage is not being maintained if it still has mtv.com, which was once a ubiquilink, yet now defunct.)
• Ubiquigif n. Gif images that everybody uses, for example: Standard bullets, eg. Standard icons, eg. "Under construction" gifs.
• Un-cul-de-sac n. An .html that has no links to other sites, and the local links are boring. (A web page that never gets updated eventually becomes an un-cul-de-sac.)
• Vanity plate n. Image used as a page label which adds nothing to the information on the page, especially used to describe unusually high-quality images (GNN would load a lot faster without all those vanity plates.)
• Vaporlink n. A live link to a page that hasn't been written yet. (Why the heck do so many commercial servers have vapor links everywhere?)
• Vorld vide veb vertigo (vvvv) n. The disorganizing effect wandering the the net for too long has on your ability to concentrate on one thought long enough for to come to completion. (The explosion of the web has given vvvv to those of who remember when we were lucky to find a good new site once a week.)
• Web-potato n. The web's answer to the couch potato, a regular sundowner. Not related to Hotpotato.
• Window pane n. A web page that heavily over-uses transparent gifs. (Window panes look bad on old browsers.)
• Wormhole n. A link that opens up whole new galaxy quadrants (With submissions like wormhole you realize that the only way to save America is to cancel all Star Trek TV series.)