Tim Hilliard

So having been in the web caper for a little while now I thought it was time to discuss my experiences of open source.

Probably my most profound experience in the open source arena came about when I was asked to do a project in Drupal, a highly configurable and customisable CMS package. After a little experimentation I was soon able to harness the true potential of Drupal and now use Drupal for all of my standard CMS installations. With a user base of over 400 000 users, Drupal has become a powerhouse in the world of content managed systems. Overall I would say that Drupal was a truly positive experience for me and has allowed me to grow significantly in the last 2 years as a developer.

I could keep going on about different open source packages but then this post would become infintely long so instead what I will do now is list all of the open source packages that I use and give a brief overview of why I like it.

• Drupal – as mentioned before a powerful CMS solution.
• Magento – a truly fantastic ecommerce solution that gives store owners a fantastic set of tools out of the box for setting up their own online store.
• Wordpress – a great piece of blogging software that is also being used to run this blog.
• jQuery – a powerful set of javascript classes and functions that make writing javascript for your web applications a breeze.
• Apache – probably the greatest web server going around (in my opinion anyway).
• PHP – an Apache extension that allows for powerful serverside scripting.
• MySQL – my favourite database.
• WampServer – a great WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL and PHP) stack for development on a Windows machine.
• Notepad++ – a quite powerful text editor that is great for coding.
• Subversion – quite possibly the most important backup / versioning tool for any developer.
• USVN – a great interface to Subversion which has project and user controls.
• CentOS – my personal favourite linux distro, of course there are a lot of great ones out there but this one is essentially RedHat rebranded and repackaged.
• TortoiseSVN – an excellent windows shell extension for using subversion.
• FileZilla – relatively powerful FTP program.
• Poderosa – great for creating a secure shell connection.
• 7zip – a great piece of software for compression, is compatible with most formats.

I hope some of these packages can be useful to you.

After much blood, sweat and tears from the team at Moodia, we have relaunched our new website aimed at capitalising on the emergence of Conversion Rate Optimisation in the rapidly changing environment of websites.

Moodia website

The new site presents a striking yet clean interface with a focus on usability and in particular the navigation. Although not live yet, the Moodia site will also include a blog which will be a place where our intelligent team of optimisers can share their wealth of knowledge. If you are looking to get better results out of your website, head on over to Moodia and see what website optimisation can do for you.

So I packed my bags not so long ago and headed over to London where I now live. Wow, what a change, a great change though. But by far the biggest surprise for me was the job I managed to land, I think I’ve hit the jackpot. My hat goes off to the staff at Moodia for their positive and enthusiastic approach.